recognize a 20,000-ton liner.

In short, power and culture were in separate compartments. The
barbarians were not only literally in the saddle, but on the
front bench in the House of commons, with nobody to correct their
incredible ignorance of modern thought and political science but
upstarts from the counting-house, who had spent their lives
furnishing their pockets instead of their minds. Both, however,
were practised in dealing with money and with men, as far as
acquiring the one and exploiting the other went; and although
this is as undesirable an expertness as that of the medieval
robber baron, it qualifies men to keep an estate or a business
going in its old routine without necessarily understanding it,
just as Bond Street tradesmen and domestic servants keep
fashionable society going without any instruction in sociology.



The Cherry Orchard

The Heartbreak people neither could nor would do anything of the
sort. With their heads as full of the Anticipations of Mr H. G.
Wells as the heads of our actual rulers were empty even of the
anticipations of Erasmus or Sir Thomas More, they refused the
drudgery of politics, and would have made a very poor job of it
if they had changed their minds. Not that they would have been
allowed to meddle anyhow, as only through the accident of being a
hereditary peer can anyone in these days of Votes for Everybody
get into parliament if handicapped by a serious modern cultural
equipment; but if they had, their habit of living in a vacuum