not. If he said yes, he was held fit to be a Prime Minister, though,
as our ablest Churchman has said, the real implication was that he was
either a fool, a bigot, or a liar. Darwin destroyed this test; but when
it was only thoughtlessly dropped, there was no test at all; and the
door to public trust was open to the man who had no sense of God because
he had no sense of anything beyond his own business interests and
personal appetites and ambitions. As a result, the people who did
not feel in the least inconvenienced by being no longer governed by
Nobodaddy soon found themselves very acutely inconvenienced by being
governed by fools and commercial adventurers. They had forgotten not
only God but Goldsmith, who had warned them that 'honor sinks where
commerce long prevails.'

The lieutenants of God are not always persons: some of them are
legal and parliamentary fictions. One of them is Public Opinion. The
pre-Darwinian statesmen and publicists were not restrained directly by
God; but they restrained themselves by setting up an image of a Public
Opinion which would not tolerate any attempt to tamper with British
liberties. Their favorite way of putting it was that any Government
which proposed such and such an infringement of such and such a British
liberty would be hurled from office in a week. This was not true: there
was no such public opinion, no limit to what the British people would
put up with in the abstract, and no hardship short of immediate and
sudden starvation that it would not and did not put up with in the
concrete. But this very helplessness of the people had forced their
rulers to pretend that they were not helpless, and that the certainty of
a sturdy and unconquerable popular resistance forbade any trifling with
Magna Carta or the Petition of Rights or the authority of parliament.
Now the reality behind this fiction was the divine sense that liberty
is a need vital to human growth. Accordingly, though it was difficult