PREFACE
Democracy means Death reveals at once the object with which I undertook to investigate this problem—that is to say, with the object of raising the controversy if possible to a plane higher than mere "matters of opinion" and mere political party; and the impartiality with which I have pointed the finger at the errors and general incompetence of a particular Aristocracy should be sufficient to prove the non-political and non-party spirit with which I entered upon the investigation.
The two chapters devoted to Charles I and the Puritan Rebellion, respectively, may seem to some a little irrelevant in a book of this nature; but when it is remembered that I needed a convincing example of the divergence of bad taste from good taste, and that this particular divergence of bad taste from good represents the most imposing instance of the kind which the history of England records—so much so, indeed, that the act of murder committed in 1649 may be regarded as a decisive turning-point in the fortunes of the English people, and a choice of roads which has undoubtedly led to all the evils concerning the origin of which most of us are now consciously or unconsciously inquiring—this excursion into the records of the past, and particularly into the records of the seventeenth century, will perhaps appear more justified and indispensable.
I do not claim to have adduced all the evidence possible for the support of my thesis—most of it, probably, I do not even know—but if I have succeeded in providing at least a stimulating introduction to the point of view taken in these pages, I shall feel that this is not altogether a superfluous book, or one that can be lightly set aside and ignored. For it is not as if the subject of Aristocracy had been discussed ad nauseam by a large galaxy of able writers. A glance at the Subject Catalogue of the London Library alone shows how inadequately it has been treated compared with the long list of books which deal with the opposing principle of Democracy. There are in all only nine books mentioned under the heading Aristocracy in
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