I can give two chance cases in which the common or Cockney joke was a much better prophecy than the careful observations of the most cultured observer.  When England was agitated, previous to the last General Election, about the existence of Chinese labour, there was a distinct difference between the tone of the politicians and the tone of the populace.  The politicians who disapproved of Chinese labour were most careful to explain that they did not in any sense disapprove of Chinese.  According to them, it was a pure question of legal propriety, of whether certain clauses in the contract of indenture were not inconsistent with our constitutional traditions:  according to them, the case would have been the same if the people had been Kaffirs or Englishmen.  It all sounded wonderfully enlightened and lucid; and in comparison the popular joke looked, of course, very poor.  For the popular joke against the Chinese labourers was simply that they were Chinese; it was an objection to an alien type; the popular papers were full of gibes about pigtails and yellow faces.  It seemed that the Liberal politicians were raising an intellectual objection to a doubtful document of State; while it seemed that the Radical populace were merely roaring with idiotic laughter at the sight of a Chinaman’s clothes.  But the popular instinct was justified, for the vices revealed were Chinese vices.

But there is another case more pleasant and more up to date.  The popular papers always persisted in representing the New Woman or the Suffragette as an ugly woman, fat, in spectacles, with bulging clothes, and generally falling off a bicycle.  As a matter of plain external fact, there was not a word of truth in this.  The leaders of the movement of female emancipation are not at all ugly; most of them are extraordinarily good-looking.  Nor are they at all indifferent to art or decorative costume; many of them are alarmingly attached to these things.  Yet the popular instinct was right.  For the popular instinct was that in this movement, rightly or wrongly, there was an element of indifference to female dignity, of a quite new willingness of women to be grotesque.  These women did truly despise the pontifical quality of woman.  And in our streets and around our Parliament we have seen the stately woman of art and culture turn into the comic woman of Comic Bits.  And whether we think the exhibition justifiable or not, the prophecy of the comic papers is justified:  the healthy and vulgar masses were conscious of a hidden enemy to their traditions who has now come out into the daylight, that the scriptures might be fulfilled.  For the two things that a healthy person hates most between heaven and hell are a woman who is not dignified and a man who is.

THE FALLACY OF SUCCESS