truth, and that is a subtle truth. It is one not very easy to state
correctly. It can, perhaps, be most correctly stated by saying that,
even if the man is the head of the house, he knows he is the figurehead.

But the vulgar comic papers are so subtle and true that they are even
prophetic. If you really want to know what is going to happen to the
future of our democracy, do not read the modern sociological prophecies,
do not read even Mr. Wells's Utopias for this purpose, though you should
certainly read them if you are fond of good honesty and good English. If
you want to know what will happen, study the pages of _Snaps_ or
_Patchy Bits_ as if they were the dark tablets graven with the
oracles of the gods. For, mean and gross as they are, in all seriousness,
they contain what is entirely absent from all Utopias and all the
sociological conjectures of our time: they contain some hint of the
actual habits and manifest desires of the English people. If we are
really to find out what the democracy will ultimately do with itself,
we shall surely find it, not in the literature which studies the people,
but in the literature which the people studies.

I can give two chance cases in which the common or Cockney joke was a
much better prophecy than the careful observations of the most cultured
observer. When England was agitated, previous to the last General
Election, about the existence of Chinese labour, there was a distinct
difference between the tone of the politicians and the tone of the
populace. The politicians who disapproved of Chinese labour were most
careful to explain that they did not in any sense disapprove of Chinese.
According to them, it was a pure question of legal propriety, of whether
certain clauses in the contract of indenture were not inconsistent with
our constitutional traditions: according to them, the case would have
been the same if the people had been Kaffirs or Englishmen. It all