innumerable unknown guests. But there is a real danger lest this
tradition of privacy may be abolished in English democracy, simply
because of its connection with aristocratic manners. A young labour
politician is expected to live in more than American conditions of
intimate publicity. Having, perhaps, just left the working bench, and
having to adjust his nerves and his bodily health to the difficult
requirements of mental work, he is expected to receive every caller at
any hour of the day or night with the same hearty good will, and to be
always ready to share or excite the enthusiasm of his followers. After a
year or two, in the case of a man of sensitive nervous organisation, the
task is found to be impossible. The signs of nervous fatigue are at
first accepted by him and his friends as proofs of his sincerity. He
begins to suffer from the curate's disease, the bright-eyed, hysterical
condition in which a man talks all day long to a succession of
sympathetic hearers about his own overwork, and drifts into actual
ill-health, though he is not making an hour's continuous exertion in the
day. I knew a young agitator in that state who thought that he could not
make a propagandist speech unless the deeply admiring pitman, in whose
cottage he was staying, played the Marseillaise on a harmonium before he
started. Often such a man takes to drink. In any case he is liable, as
the East End clergymen who try to live the same life are liable, to the
most pitiable forms of moral collapse.

Such men, however, are those who being unfit for a life without privacy,
do not survive. Greater political danger comes perhaps from those who
are comparatively fit. Any one who has been in America, who has stood
among the crowd in a Philadelphian law-court during the trial of a
political case, or has seen the thousands of cartoons in a contest in
which Tammany is concerned, will find that he has a picture in his mind
of one type at least of those who do survive.