The episode illustrates the curious perversion of the English
sense of honor when the privileges and prestige of the
aristocracy are at stake. Mr. Frank Harris said, after the
disastrous battle of Modder River, that the English, having lost
America a century ago because they preferred George III, were
quite prepared to lose South Africa to-day because they preferred
aristocratic commanders to successful ones. Horace Walpole, when
the parliamentary recess came at a critical period of the War of
Independence, said that the Lords could not be expected to lose
their pheasant shooting for the sake of America. In the working
class, which, like all classes, has its own official aristocracy,
there is the same reluctance to discredit an institution or to
"do a man out of his job." At bottom, of course, this apparently
shameless sacrifice of great public interests to petty personal
ones, is simply the preference of the ordinary man for the things
he can feel and understand to the things that are beyond his
capacity. It is stupidity, not dishonesty.

Burgoyne fell a victim to this stupidity in two ways. Not only
was he thrown over, in spite of his high character and
distinguished services, to screen a court favorite who had
actually been cashiered for cowardice and misconduct in the field
fifteen years before; but his peculiar critical temperament and
talent, artistic, satirical, rather histrionic, and his
fastidious delicacy of sentiment, his fine spirit and humanity,
were just the qualities to make him disliked by stupid people
because of their dread of ironic criticism. Long after his death,
Thackeray, who had an intense sense of human character, but was
typically stupid in valuing and interpreting it, instinctively