paper, costing a halfpenny, which they believed to be
extraordinarily bright and attractive, and which never really
succeeded until it became extremely dull, discarding all serious
news and replacing it by vapid tittle-tattle, and substituting for
political articles informed by at least some pretence of knowledge
of economics, history, and constitutional law, such paltry follies
and sentimentalities, snobberies and partisaneries, as ignorance
can understand and irresponsibility relish.

What they called patriotism was a conviction that because they
were born in Tooting or Camberwell, they were the natural
superiors of Beethoven, of Rodin, of Ibsen, of Tolstoy and all
other benighted foreigners. Those of them who did not think it
wrong to go to the theatre liked above everything a play in which
the hero was called Dick; was continually fingering a briar pipe;
and, after being overwhelmed with admiration and affection
through three acts, was finally rewarded with the legal possession
of a pretty heroine's person on the strength of a staggering lack
of virtue. Indeed their only conception of the meaning of the word
virtue was abstention from stealing other men's wives or from
refusing to marry their daughters.

As to law, religion, ethics, and constitutional government, any
counterfeit could impose on them. Any atheist could pass himself
off on them as a bishop, any anarchist as a judge, any despot as a
Whig, any sentimental socialist as a Tory, any philtre-monger or
witch-finder as a man of science, any phrase-maker as a statesman.
Those who did not believe the story of Jonah and the great fish
were all the readier to believe that metals can be transmuted and
all diseases cured by radium, and that men can live for two