Culture is going to suffer from a flattening, a repetition, a staleness, a lack of dignity and distinction, the first thing that everybody will say is, "Oh, that is democracy." It is asserted that our Government in England is a democracy, with a deplorable taste for paradox which I regret. I do not think that the Government in England is a democracy. I do not deny that democracy has its own particular vices; but it is not of a democratic vice that I am talking. As I understand the democratic idea, it is that the vast mass of ordinary people, including all the poor people and the working people, should have the maximum of direct effect upon Government. Although that has very real evils of its own, I do not think that this evil comes from that. There are great dangers, possibly, in the government, or in the influence, of uneducated people. I myself think that it is more often the evil of badly educated people, especially when they are also over-educated people; but there are evils in that. There would be faults and deficiencies in a State in which, let us say, peasants who could not read or write, or rough-and-ready farmers who lived in the country far from any town, or workmen with very little leisure for reading, had too overwhelming a power in the community. That is quite true; but I do not think that that will produce this evil.
The kind of thing that I mean is a certain large and gross familiarity, not always with bad but often with very good things, a familiarity that indicates insensibility to the thing that the man is handling, that sort of insensibility which is sometimes if anything more remarkable in the richer and in the
