things.

The beginning of concessions is so entirely reasonable and easy! But
the concessions go on. Each step upward in the British system finds
that system more persistently about them. When one has started out
under a King one may find amiable but whom one may not respect,
admitted a system one does not believe in, when one has rubbed the
first bloom off one's honour, it is infinitely easier to begin peeling
the skin. Many a man whose youth was a dream of noble things, who was
all for splendid achievements and the service of mankind, peers to-day,
by virtue of such acquiescences, from between preposterous lawn sleeves
or under a tilted coronet, sucked as dry of his essential honour as a
spider sucks a fly.

But this is going too far, the reader will object! There must be
concessions, there must be conformities, just as there must be some
impurity in the water we drink and flaws in the beauty we give our
hearts to, and that, no doubt, is true. It is no reason why we should
drink sewage and kneel to grossness and base stupidity. To endure the
worst because we cannot have the best is surely the last word of folly.
Our business as New Republicans is not to waste our lives in the
pursuit of an unattainable chemical purity, but to clear the air as
much as possible. Practical ethics is, after all, a quantitative
science. In the reality of life there are few absolute cases, and it is
foolish to forego a great end for a small concession. But to suffer so
much Royalty and Privilege as an Englishman has to do before he may
make any effectual figure in public life is not a small concession. By
the time you have purchased power you may find you have given up
everything that made power worth having. It would be a small
concession, I admit, a mere personal self-sacrifice, to pretend