But what then? Shall we exclaim, in a fat voice: “Aha! Power! Glory! Force! The Man!”—and proceed to set up a harmless Mussolini, or a fat Rivera? Well, let us, if we want to. Only it won’t make the slightest difference to our real living. Except it’s probably a good thing to have the press—the newspaper press—crushed under the up-to-date rubber heel of a tyrannous but harmless dictator.
We won’t speak of poor old Hindenburg. Except, why didn’t they set up his wooden statue with all the nails knocked into it, for a President? For surely they drove something in, with those nails!
We had a harmless dictator, in Mr. Lloyd George. Better go ahead with the Houses of Representatives, than have another shot in that direction.
Power! How can there be power in politics, when politics is money?
Money is power, they say. Is it? Money is to power what margarine is to butter: a nasty substitute.
No, power is something you’ve got to respect, even revere, before you can have it. It isn’t bossing, or bullying, hiring a manservant or Salvationising your social inferior, issuing loud orders and getting your own way, doing your opponent down. That isn’t power.
Power is pouvoir: to be able to.
Might: the ability to make: to bring about that which may-be.
And where are we to get Power, or Might, or Glory, or Honour, or Wisdom?
Out of Lloyd George, or Lenin, or Mussolini, or Rivera, or anything else political?