Mr. Cobb regarded him with the restrained temper of one who has ex plained who he was (and is) to the British War Office three days in suc

cession.

“I am not an American officer," corrected Mr. Cobb.

"Oh, I see," said the fitter. "Regulation British it is, sir."

Mr. Cobb hated to distress him, so he waited until the calf measurement, at full inhalation, had been noted down, whereupon he mentioned casually:

"I am not a British officer.”

"Eh, what?" said the fitter, reclining on his heels. "What shall I make it, sir?"

“God knows," says Mr. Cobb, dejectedly.

The measuring proceeded. After the Sam Browne diagonal had been secured by means of trigonometry and a ball of twine, Mr. Cobb prepared to leave. The fitter seemed bewildered and somewhat depressed. Mr. Cobb had an inspiration.

"I have just been appointed a colonel on the staff of the Governor of Kentucky,” he remarked, and was rewarded by an instant look of relief on the fitter's face. The atmosphere seemed to have cleared immeasurably.

"And do you know," says Mr. Cobb, "when I put that uniform on and looked at myself in the glass I looked like a Field Marshal in the Palestine Guards."

PROEM

Observe first, that the contrast between virtue and power is not much felt on frontiers and in new lands. In Mr. Barrie's revealing drama called The Admirable Crichton there is an artistic exhibition of this truth. The efficient butler of a ship-wrecked English family, deploying in a crude and savage environment his latent resources of wisdom and valour, becomes the acknowledged head of the household. Thus, in a wilderness, natural rectitude coincides with social power. The case is different in old cities, and the playwright does not miss the clinching point of his demonstration. The family is rescued and returns to London; and there the butler's elemental dominance does not save him from social feebleness. In the last scene of the play he is presented in servile habit as of old, gliding noiselessly over the polished floors, in that hush of selfeffacement which is supposed to be becoming to the good.

It would not be difficult to show

by historical studies that nearly all aristocracies have gained their origi nal differential of power by their virtues. The tradition of the beau monde-patrician, gentry, Samurai -begins generally with a superiority in courage, in skill with tools and arms, and in practical understanding and social sensitiveness-the feeling of the reality and importance of the common life.

But the experience of history is that this originating moral superiority of aristocracies does not last. It stifles itself in settled privilege. Thus it appears that the qualifications that preside at the origin of a ruling class are of a higher moral character than those that preserve its later power.

Ruling classes have their beginnings in pioneering or revolutionary moments when the salutary law of health and service breaks through the false tissues of social conventions. But as the social tissue knits again at the end of pioneering or revolutionary episodes, it has never yet failed, as a matter of historic fact, to develop a law unfavourable to elemental virtue and offering promotion to ambitious men on terms quite other than those of natural worth. Hence has arisen the literary and popular assumption that no man or class can be trusted with power unless another man or class is set to watch. It is falsely supposed that aristocracies decay because power, in its very nature, is corrupting.

Now the truth is that power cleanses and integrates the will, to the extent that it is derived from

courage and enterprise. The kind of power that properly belongs to a man does not corrupt him. He is corrupted only when he consents to exercise powers that are not histhat are merely imputed to him by a legal fiction. It is not characteristic of strong men to take the lead in such inventions. Therefore it is inaccurate to say that power is corrupting, without specifying the kind of power that is meant. The strong do not corrupt the weak, but the weak the strong. Society in the large corrupts its élite. The vast tides of false social tradition have overwhelmed again and again, a thousand times, the adventures of highspirited men toward a happier order of linked power and virtue.

II

This literary and popular notion that power necessarily tends toward moral debasement, is evidently only a special phase of the wider mental phenomenon we are dealing with, to wit: the age-old separation between the thought of what is right and the thought of what is practical. Thus in setting out to discover why it is that aristocracies make their entrances by one law and their exits by another, we are brought in face of the question: Why is it so hard for the mass of men to believe in the goodness of power, or in the potential strength and prevalence of what is right? Why this age-long wistfulness-this abstract and passive devotion to the undoable, and this resigned engrossment in things that are confessed to be of inferior interest and worth?

How is it that Americans-even Americans have come to think that the business by which people get their living must of necessity be actuated by lower motives than those that are supposed to obtain in churches and law courts? Why do we have institutions to cultivate idealism as a specialty, and other

quite different and wholly incommensurable institutions to cultivate practicality as a specialty? Why are we scandalised by the idea that there is a natural congruity between might and right? Why do we think of democracy as a delicate flower of the spirit growing in a sheltered garden

a flower that can be nurtured only in happy times and that needs to be walled and made safe by something that is not democracy? Why do we imagine that the vital and definitive power of a nation, the power of arms, should be regarded as a peculiar cult, superseding the arts and the humanities in grave moments, and requiring that everybody in civil society should eat, sleep, work and think in unfamiliar moods and tenses? Why is it that nothing but war itselfof such magnitude that it is in effect the sum of all wars-can make us understand that war-power is only a by-product of creative power; and that the rule of the world belongs to those who do not keep their creative imagination, their visions of the right way to do things—in a chamber of the mind that does not communicate with the common living rooms?

-a war

The answer to this question-or to these questions, for they are all one and the same-is the key to the authentic science of society.

The study of mass action and the psychology of the crowd can never get beyond the refined empiricism of such writers as John Fiske and Gustave Le Bon-can never become true science, furnishing a basis for enter. prise and prophecy-until the historical schism between the concep tive and the executive faculties of mankind, with its entail of futility and tragedy, is recognised by savants as the right point of departure. This is only another way of saying that we cannot begin to put order into our knowledge of what men in the mass have done or are likely to do until we accept the fact that average