The Travellers in State - Page 2

a thing as mankind.
Then at last (and it fell in as exactly as the right last note of a tune
one is trying to remember) he said: "Well, I s'pose we 'ave to do it."
And in those three things, his first speech and his silence and his
second speech, there were all the three great fundamental facts of
the English democracy, its profound sense of humour, its profound sense
of pathos, and its profound sense of helplessness.

. . . . .

It cannot be too often repeated that all real democracy is an attempt
(like that of a jolly hostess) to bring the shy people out.
For every practical purpose of a political state, for every practical
purpose of a tea-party, he that abaseth himself must be exalted.
At a tea-party it is equally obvious that he that exalteth
himself must be abased, if possible without bodily violence.
Now people talk of democracy as being coarse and turbulent:
it is a self-evident error in mere history. Aristocracy is the thing
that is always coarse and turbulent: for it means appealing to the
self-confident people. Democracy means appealing to the different
people. Democracy means getting those people to vote who would never
have the cheek to govern: and (according to Christian ethics) the
precise people who ought to govern are the people who have not the
cheek to do it. There is a strong example of this truth in my friend
in the train. The only two types we hear of in this argument about crime
and punishment are two very rare and abnormal types.

We hear of the stark sentimentalist, who talks as if there were no
problem at all: as if physical kindness would cure everything:
as if one need only pat Nero and stroke Ivan the Terrible.
This mere belief in bodily humanitarianism is not sentimental;
it is simply snobbish. For if comfort gives men virtue,
the comfortable classes ought to be virtuous--which is absurd.
Then, again, we do hear of the yet weaker and more watery
type of sentimentalists: I mean the sentimentalist who says,
with a sort of splutter, "Flog the brutes!" or who tells you
with innocent obscenity "what he would do" with a certain man--
always supposing the man's hands were tied.

This is the more effeminate type of the two; but both are weak
and unbalanced. And it is only these two types, the sentimental
humanitarian and the sentimental brutalitarian, whom one hears
in the modern babel. Yet you very rarely meet either of them
in a train. You never meet anyone else in a controversy.
The man you meet in a train is like this man that I met:
he is emotionally decent, only he is intellectually doubtful.
So far from luxuriating in the loathsome things that could
be "done" to criminals, he feels bitterly how much better