Konx Om Pax

THIEN TAO; OR, THE SYNAGOGUE OF SATAN 57 very bitter against the Upper House; and those who had failed in examinations wrote appalling diatribes against the folly of the educa tional system. The trouble was that they were right; the government was well enough in fact, but in theory had hardly a leg to stand on. In view of the growing clamour, the official classes were perturbed; for many of their number were intelligent enough to see that a thoroughly irra tional system, however well it may work in practice, cannot for ever be maintained against the attacks of those who, though they may be secretly stigmatized as doctrinaires, can bring forward unanswerable arguments. The people had power, but not reason; so were amenable to the fallacies which they mistook for reason and not to the power which they would have imagined to be tyranny. An intelligent plebs is docile; an educated canaille expects everything to be logical. The shallow sophisms of the socialist were intelligible; they could not be refuted by the profounder and therefore unintelligible propositions of the Tory. The mob could understand the superficial resemblance of babies; they could not be got to understand that the circumstances of educa tion and environment made but a small portion of the equipment of a conscious being. The brutal and truthful “You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s car” had been forgotten for the smooth and plausible fallacies of such writers as Ki Ra Di. So serious had the situation become, indeed, that the governing classes had abandoned all dogmas of Divine Right and the like as untenable. The theory of heredity had broken down, and the ennoble ment of the cheesemongers made it not only false, but ridiculous. We consequently find them engaged in the fatuous task of defend ing the anomalies which disgusted the nation by a campaign of glaring and venal sophistries. These deceived nobody, and only in spired the contempt, which might have been harmless, with a hate which threatened to engulph the community in an abyss of the most formidable convulsions.