But whatever else the great lords forgot they never forgot that it
was their business to stand for the new things, for whatever was
being most talked about among university dons or fussy financiers.
Thus they were on the side of the Reformation against the Church,
of the Whigs against the Stuarts, of the Baconian science
against the old philosophy, of the manufacturing system
against the operatives, and (to-day) of the increased power
of the State against the old-fashioned individualists.
In short, the rich are always modern; it is their business.
But the immediate effect of this fact upon the question we
are studying is somewhat singular.

In each of the separate holes or quandaries in which the ordinary
Englishman has been placed, he has been told that his
situation is, for some particular reason, all for the best.
He woke up one fine morning and discovered that the public things,
which for eight hundred years he had used at once as inns
and sanctuaries, had all been suddenly and savagely abolished,
to increase the private wealth of about six or seven men.
One would think he might have been annoyed at that;
in many places he was, and was put down by the soldiery.
But it was not merely the army that kelp him quiet.
He was kept quiet by the sages as well as the soldiers;
the six or seven men who took away the inns of the poor told him
that they were not doing it for themselves, but for the religion
of the future, the great dawn of Protestantism and truth.
So whenever a seventeenth century noble was caught pulling
down a peasant's fence and stealing his field, the noble
pointed excitedly at the face of Charles I or James II
(which at that moment, perhaps, wore a cross expression)