This is not the fact, but
it is much nearer the truth. Every man who is married knows quite well,
not only that he does not regard his wife as a chattel, but that no man
can conceivably ever have done so. The joke stands for an ultimate
truth, and that is a subtle truth. It is one not very easy to state
correctly. It can, perhaps, be most correctly stated by saying that,
even if the man is the head of the house, he knows he is the figurehead.
But the vulgar comic papers are so subtle and true that they are even
prophetic. If you really want to know what is going to happen to the
future of our democracy, do not read the modern sociological prophecies,
do not read even Mr. Wells's Utopias for this purpose, though you should
certainly read them if you are fond of good honesty and good English. If
you want to know what will happen, study the pages of _Snaps_ or
_Patchy Bits_ as if they were the dark tablets graven with the
oracles of the gods. For, mean and gross as they are, in all seriousness,
they contain what is entirely absent from all Utopias and all the
sociological conjectures of our time: they contain some hint of the
actual habits and manifest desires of the English people.
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