loyalty, kneel and kiss hands, assist at Coronation mummeries, and all
the rest of it, in order, let us say, to accomplish some great
improvement in the schools of the country, were it not for the fact
that all these things must be done in the sight of the young, that you
cannot kneel to the King without presenting a kneeling example to the
people, without becoming as good a teacher of servility as though you
were servile to the marrow. There lies the trouble. By virtue of this
reaction it is that the shams and ceremonies we may fancy mere curious
survivals, mere kinks and tortuosities, cloaks and accessories to-day,
will, if we are silent and acquiescent, be halfway to reality again in
the course of a generation. To our children they are not evidently
shams; they are powerful working suggestions. Human institutions are
things of life, and whatever weed of falsity lies still rooted in the
ground has the promise and potency of growth. It will tend perpetually,
according to its nature, to recover its old influence over the
imagination, the thoughts, and acts of our children.

Even when the whole trend of economic and social development sets
against the real survival of such a social and political system as the
British, its pretensions, its shape and implications may survive,
survive all the more disastrously because they are increasingly
insincere. Indeed, in a sense, the British system, the pyramid of King,
land-owning and land-ruling aristocracy, yeomen and trading middle-
class and labourers, is dead--it died in the nineteenth century under
the wheels of mechanism [Footnote: I have discussed this fully in
_Anticipations_, Chapter III., Developing Social Elements.]--and
the crude beginnings of a new system are clothed in its raiment, and
greatly encumbered by that clothing. Our greatest peers are
shareholders, are equipped by marriage with the wealth of Jews and
Americans, are exploiters of colonial resources and urban building