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Typos — p. 94: perserverance [= perseverance]; p. 96: constitues [= constitutes]; p. 97: Educational [= Educative] - p. 94 - XIV The Tone-Setting Élite As late as 1775, when Beaumarchais produced his Barbier de Seville, there was still no sign in Europe of any understanding of the causes of Aristocracy's consummate failure. Even the aristocrats themselves had no idea of what had brought about their degeneration and disgrace.         Beaumarchais makes Figaro exclaim, "Un grand nous fait assez de bien quand il nous fait pas de mal." (Act I, Sc. II: "The great show us kindness enough when they merely refrain from injuring us."). This was fifteen years after Voltaire had made the shallow remark about heredity quoted in Chapter XI ante; and it reveals the exasperation still felt by the French intelligentsia at the ignominy of their national élite. But even eighteen years after the first performance of the Beaumarchais' play, English "intellectuals" displayed the same exasperation over their élite and, in the political remedies they suggested showed no deeper insight than did their opposite numbers across the Channel.         This can be ascertained by any one who to-day has the perserverance to plod through the 895 pages of what is probably the stupidest book ever written by a modern European — William Godwin's Inquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) — which memorialises what at the close of the eighteenth century English Liberalism solemnly expected the public to accept as "Thought". In all its 895 quarto pages I was able to discover only one passage which might reasonably pass as sensible, and that is where Godwin attacks the Ballot (Bk. IV, Chap. X).         Starting off with the usual rubbishy assumptions about Man's native goodness (Bk. 1, Chap. III), it proceeds to deny the possibility of any hereditary gifts and attacks Property in wholly Communistic style. "To whom does any article of property, suppose a loaf of bread, belong? — To him who most - p. 95 - wants it," says Godwin. (Vol. II, Bk. VII, Chap. 1) "My neighbour", he says, "has as much right to put an end to my existence with a dagger or poison as to deny me that assistance without which I must starve, or as to deny me the pecuniary assistance without which my intellectual attainments or my moral exertions will be materially injured." (Bk. II, Chap. V).         Incredible as it may seem, although this sort of slip-shod theorising is spread over the whole book and should have proved a sufficient safeguard against its popularity, such was the intellectual depravity of the Age that the Government seriously considered prosecuting the Author, and refrained from doing so only because the three guineas he was asking for his book made it inaccessible to the multitude.         Yet the work enjoyed a considerable vogue. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Tom Wedgwood and Crabb Robinson fell under its spell. But only on Shelley — that grossly overrated poet — did it make a lasting impression. In all its staggering benightedness, it was essentially English; for had not that paragon of "sound common sense" and "practical sagacity" — Samuel Johnson — remarked on July 20th 1765 (when Godwin was only 7 years old) about theft, "When we consider by what unjust methods property has been often acquired and that what was unjustly got it must be unjust to keep, where is the harm in one man's taking the property of another from him?" (Boswell's Johnson).         Was it this and similar gaffes on the learned Doctor's part that led Ste Beuve to describe him as "the king of clownish pundits"? ("Le roi des cuistres").         At all events, his remark was a noteworthy anticipation of Lenin who, 154 years later, in April 1917, was to incite the mob of St. Petersburg to pillage the possessing classes by exhorting them to "Rob back that which has been robbed!"         The English intelligentsia of the late eighteenth century certainly seems to have been incapable of finding any better solution of the problem of national government than that proposed by the earliest Liberal philosophers. And this was unforgivable in the scholars among them, seeing that they had long had under their eyes Aristotle's informative statement that "Aristocracies are mostly destroyed from virtue not being properly joined to power." (Politics' II, Bk. V. 1307a). Here lay the clue to the mystery, and they overlooked it. - p. 96 -         The fact that the aristocrats themselves right up to the end of the eighteenth century were guilty of the same oversight, hardly excuses their less noble opponents; for nowhere in the ruling classes of France and England were there any thinkers of the stamp of Locke, Voltaire, Beaumarchais, Samuel Johnson, etc.         Unfortunately, the besetting sin of even the less besotted political thinkers — I do not mean Godwin, because he was hors concours in imbecility — has always been to confound the virtues of an institution with the virtues of the personnel trying to run it, as if an atrocious pianist always implied a bad piano. "No institution," said Emerson, "will be better than the institutor?" (Essay on Character). And the fact that he thought it necessary to utter this platitude, reveals to what depths of inanity political speculation had sunk as recently as 1844.         Even if the intelligentsia of France and England at the close of the eighteenth century and thereafter, may have been too indignant to recognise that the aristocratic debacle did not invalidate the institution of Aristocracy itself as a form of administration, how can they be forgiven for not having known that in every civilised community, government is never concerned with executive functions alone, but also and above all with establishing among the people a "Good Tone" in their way of life — that is to say those standards of honour, decency civility and good taste on which the harmony, order, smoothness, probity and ideals of beauty and desirability in their social intercourse depend.         Now, the only source from which a people can obtain this "blue print" of becoming behaviour, which is the code of rules prescribing all the things they should reject and all those they should accept, is their own élite who become the model all desire to emulate. For, as Aristotle so aptly observed, "What those who have the chief power regard as honourable will necessarily be the object which the citizens in general will aim at." (Politics II, Chap. XI, 1273a-1273b).         The fact that until the day before yesterday, no Liberal ever grasped that this essential function of government depended for its adequate performance on a gifted and competent élite, and that all the great styles, all the tasteful creations of the famous cultures of the past have been the outcome of this form of example and leadership, constitues the gravamen of the - p. 97 - charge that can be brought against the whole of the Liberal ideology.         At all events, it must be obvious that it is the complete absence from our present-day Western societies of any élite able to set a high standard of decency and good tone, that is chiefly responsible for the steady deterioration of our way of life and the decay of our civilisation.         Having, like the Liberals, forgotten or never known about the indispensability of a Tone-setting minority if a society is to remain sound and flourishing; and having never heard of Paul Adam's noble sentiment, that "L'honneur n'est pas d'être envié mais d'être respecté" ("La Morale de L'Amour, Chap. XVIII: "Honour consists, not in being envied but in being respected"), all that our so-called "Upper Classes" have taught the masses for generations, is the art of exciting envy rather than respect; and, as we can see for ourselves, the success of their teaching has been spectacular.         Most shameful of all, however, is the way in which these disreputable leaders of our modern world, have left it to a notorious Liberal to restate in emphatic terms the need of a Tone-setting élite if our civilisation is to survive, driven by the spectacle of vulgarity and anarchy everywhere triumphant, an arch-Liberal and Democrat — Sir Frederick Clarke — probably unwittingly echoing a Conservative thinker like Sir Henry S. Maine, has recently reminded us that "The bulk of the major cultural achievements of mankind have come from the presence in society of a minority so placed that either through its free energies, or through its patronage of genius, it could concern itself with the higher refinements of living." (Freedom in the Educational Society, 1948, Chap. II).         Sir Frederick Clarke goes on to argue that this minority and its special functions constituted and always will constitute an indispensable part of every civilised community, and only at our peril can we try to dispense with it.         That we should long have been able to assume that we could get along without it and find all we need in the bright ideas of our Liberal Philosophers, may explain how a writer like T. S. Eliot, for instance, can speak of the last 150 years of our history as "An Age of progressive degradation."         Incidentally, the passage from Sir Henry Maine's works which I had in mind when I suggested above that Sir Frederick - p. 98 - Clarke may have unwittingly echoed him, occurs in Essay Three of his Popular Government, where he says: "I have sometimes thought it one of the chief drawbacks in modern democracy that, while it gives birth to despotism with the greatest facility, it does not seem capable of producing aristocracy, though from that form of political and social ascendancy all improvement has hitherto sprung."

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