not deities but concepts. Now begins the influence of books and general theories upon politics — in the China of Lao-tse as in the Athens of the Sophists and the Europe of Montesquieu — and the public opinion formed by them plants itself in the path of diplomacy as a political magnitude of quite a new sort. It would be absurd to suppose that Pisistratus or Richelieu or even Cromwell determined their actions under the influence of abstract systems, but after the victory of "Enlightenment" that is what actually happens.
Nevertheless the historical role of the great concepts of the Civilization is very different from the complexion that they presented in the minds of the ideologues who conceived them. The effect of a truth is always quite different from its tendency. In the world of facts, truths are simply means, effective in so far as they dominate spirits and therefore determine actions. Their historical position is determined not by whether they are deep, correct, or even merely logical, but by whether they tell. We see this in the phrase "catchword," "Schlagwort." What certain symbols, livingly experienced, are for the Springtime religions — the Holy Sepulchre for the Crusader, the Substance of Christ for the times of the Council of Nicæa — that two or three inspiriting word-sounds are for every Civilized revolution. It is only the catchwords that are facts — the residue of the philosophical or sociological system whence they come does not matter to history. But, as catchwords, they are for about two centuries powers of the first rank, stronger even than the pulse of the blood, which in the petrifying world of the outspread cities is beginning to be dulled.
But — the critical spirit is only one of the two tendencies which emerge out of the chaotic mass of the Non-Estate. Along with abstract concepts abstract Money, — money divorced from the prime values of the land — along with the study the counting-house, appear as political forces. The two are inwardly cognate and inseparable — the old opposition between priest and noble continued, acute as ever, in the bourgeois atmosphere and the city framework.[1] Of the two, moreover, it is the Money that, as pure fact, shows itself unconditionally superior to the ideal truths, which so far as the fact-world is concerned exist (as I have just said) only as catchwords, as means. If by "democracy" we mean the form which the Third Estate as such wishes to impart to public life as a whole, it must be concluded that democracy and plutocracy are the same thing under the two aspects of wish and actuality, theory and practice, knowing and doing. It is the tragic comedy of the world-improvers' and freedom-teachers' desperate fight against money that they are ipso facto assisting money to be effective. Respect for the big number — expressed in the principles of equality for all, natural rights, and universal suffrage — is just as much a class-ideal of the unclassed as freedom of public opinion (and more particularly freedom of the press) is so. These are ideals, but in actuality the freedom of public opinion involves the preparation of public
- ↑ See pp. 348.
