It is due to Lady Grove to say that she has some of the
freer and more honourable qualities of the old Whig aristocracy, as well
as their wonderful worldliness and their strange faith in the passing
fashion of our politics. For instance, she speaks of Jingo Imperialism
with a healthy English contempt; and she perceives stray and striking
truths, and records them justly--as, for instance, the greater democracy
of the Southern and Catholic countries of Europe. But in her dealings
with social formulae here in England she is, it must frankly be said, a
common mystagogue. She does not, like a decent demagogue, wish to make
people understand; she wishes to make them painfully conscious of not
understanding. Her favourite method is to terrify people from doing
things that are quite harmless by telling them that if they do they are
the kind of people who would do other things, equally harmless. If you
ask after somebody's mother (or whatever it is), you are the kind of
person who would have a pillow-case, or would not have a pillow-case. I
forget which it is; and so, I dare say, does she. If you assume the
ordinary dignity of a decent citizen and say that you don't see the harm
of having a mother or a pillow-case, she would say that of course _you_
wouldn't.
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