444 
MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS 
period of peace abroad (bar frontier skirmishes like the 
Crimean war) and prosperity at home coincided with Free 
Trade and Laissez-faire. 
Now we may return, refreshed, to the main question of 
monsters, real (like Treves') or imaginary like Jews and 
niggers. 
Why should the classes want to act as classes? It's obvious; 
"Union is strength." The worst Fifteen can do more with a 
football than the best opposing team of one-excuse 
my 
Irish! 
Well, what tortoise is that elephant based upon? Why, still 
obviously, upon the universal sense of individual weakness. 
We all want a big bruvver to tell of him! Hence the Gods and 
the Classes. It's fear at the base of the whole pyramid of 
skulls. 
How right politicians are to look upon their constituents as 
cattle! Anyone who has any experience of dealing with any 
class as such knows the futility of appealing to intelligence, 
indeed to any other qualities than those of brutes. 
And so, whenever we find one Man who has no fear like 
Ibsen's Doctor Stockmann or Mark Twain's Colonel Grainger 
that strolled out on his balcony with his shotgun to face the 
mob that had come to lynch him, he can get away with it. 
"An Enemy of the People" wrote Ibsen, "Ye are against the 
people, 0 my chosen!" says The Book of the Law. (AL, 
II: 25) 
Not only does it seem to me the only conceivable way of 
reconciling this and similar passages with "every man and 
every woman is a star" to assert the sovereignty of the 
individual, 
and to deny 
the right-to-exist 
to 
"class-consciousness," 
"crowd-psychology," 
and so to 
mob-rule and Lynch-Law, but also the only practicable plan 
whereby we may each one of us settle down peaceably to 
mind his own business, to pursue his True Will, and to 
accomplish the Great Work. 
So never lose sight for a moment of the maxim so often 
repeated in one context or another in these letters: that fear