For centuries the existing system has been wrought with the utmost patience and patriotism; and an Englishman may well shudder at the notion of any essential modification.

The good of the system is so mixed with the evil that it seems impossible to extricate and eradicate the latter without endangering English national cohesion.

Their traditional faith in compromise, their traditional dread of ideas, their traditional habit of acting first and reasoning afterwards, has made the English system a hopelessly confused bundle of semi-efficiency and semi-inefficiency--just as it has made the best English social type a gentleman, but a gentleman absolutely conditioned, tempered, and supplemented by a flunky.
While the process of becoming more of a democracy may very well injure--at any rate for a while--English national consistency, England's future as a nation is compromised by her fear of democracy.

She has built her national organization on the idea that the national welfare is better promoted by a popular loyalty which entails popular immobility, than by the exercise on the part of the people of a more individual and less subservient intellectual and moral energy.

In so doing she has for the time being renounced one of the greatest advantages of a national political and social organization--the advantage of combining great popular energy with loyalty and fertility of association.