Chapter VI

Hero-Worship


To the present Editor, not less than to Bobus, a Government of
the Wisest, what Bobus calls an Aristocracy of Talent, seems the
one healing remedy: but he is not so sanguine as Bobus with
respect to the means of realizing it. He thinks that we have at
once missed realising it, and come to need it so pressingly,
by departing far from the inner eternal Laws and taking up
with the temporary outer semblances of Laws. He thinks that
'enlightened Egoism,' never so luminous, is not the rule by
which man's life can be led. That 'Laissez-faire,' 'Supply-and-
demand,' 'Cash-payment for the sole nexus,' and so forth, were
not, are not, and will never be, a practicable Law of Union for a
Society of Men. That Poor and Rich, that Governed and Governing,
cannot long live together on any such Law of Union. Alas, he
thinks that man has a soul in him, _different_ from the stomach
in any sense of this word; that if said soul be asphyxied, and
lie quietly forgotten, the man and his affairs are in a bad way.
He thinks that said soul will have to be resuscitated from its
asphyxia; that if it prove irresuscitable, the man is not long
for this world. In brief, that Midas-eared Mammonism, double-
barreled Dilettantism, and their thousand adjuncts and corollaries,
are not the Law by which God Almighty has appointed this his
Universe to go. That, once for all, these are not the Law:
and then farther that we shall have to return to what is