commonplaces of war and patriotism, a privateer through and through.
Nobody in his plays, whether king or citizen, has any civil public
business or conception of such a thing, except in the method of
appointing constables, to the abuses in which he called attention
quite in the vein of the Fabian Society. He was concerned about
drunkenness and about the idolatry and hypocrisy of our judicial
system; but his implied remedy was personal sobriety and freedom from
idolatrous illusion in so far as he had any remedy at all, and did not
merely despair of human nature. His first and last word on parliament
was "Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see
the thing thou dost not." He had no notion of the feeling with which
the land nationalizers of today regard the fact that he was a party to
the enclosure of common lands at Wellcome. The explanation is, not a
general deficiency in his mind, but the simple fact that in his day
what English land needed was individual appropriation and cultivation,
and what the English Constitution needed was the incorporation of Whig
principles of individual liberty.



Shakespear and the British Public

I have rejected Mr Harris's view that Shakespear died broken-hearted
of "the pangs of love despised." I have given my reasons for
believing that Shakespear died game, and indeed in a state of levity
which would have been considered unbecoming in a bishop. But Mr
Harris's evidence does prove that Shakespear had a grievance and a
very serious one. He might have been jilted by ten dark ladies and
been none the worse for it; but his treatment by the British Public
was another matter. The idolatry which exasperated Ben Jonson was by