1 86 IDEALISM AND POLITICS 



The common people have sunk still lower, if that be 

 possible. They have learnt to read, but they are not 

 educated. "Properly speaking, we have no educated 

 classes." Principles of justice have lost their value to us 

 for want of imagination to realise their significance. '* The 

 easy materialism of our own time wants to hear no more of 

 principles in politics, and how they are endangered and 

 how maintained." " Even the ordinary article of the old 

 journalism has proved far too long and too heavy." The 

 literature of the masses ' ' must be diversified with headlines 

 and salted with sensationalism" ; it "must appeal to the 

 uppermost prejudices of the moment," offer "a diurnal 

 repast of bloodshed," " maintain itself by the athletic and 

 sporting news, which in the main sells the papers in the 

 streets." "No social revolution," he concludes, "will 

 come from a people so absorbed in cricket and football." 

 ' ' Should the beginnings of a movement appear, society has 

 an easy way of dealing with it. It will not hang the 

 leaders, but ask them to dinner." 



It is to be observed, in the next place, that the national 

 corruption is as deep as it is general. It is not to super- 

 ficial symptoms that Mr. Hobhouse points, any more than 

 to a particular section of the people, such as the more crude 

 and blatant Imperialists. Nor is it a temporary aberration 

 that he bewails, or the transient mood of a nation given 

 over for a time to the boisterous intoxication of material 

 aggrandisement. It is a "far-reaching change in the 

 temper of the time," a change that has penetrated into the 

 inner recesses of the nation's spirit and mingled with its 

 most intimate motives. For there has been "intellectual 

 reaction," and ' ' a religious relapse." ' ' The decay in vivid 

 and profound religious belief was in process a generation 



