"The important point is, however, that there is more fact and realism in the wildest and most elegant old fictions about disinherited dukes and long–lost daughters than there is in this Eugenist attempt to make the poor all of a piece—a sort of black fungoid growth that is ceaselessly increasing in a chasm. There is a cheap sneer at poor landladies: that they always say they have seen better days. Nine times out of ten they say it because it is true. What can be said of the great mass of Englishmen, by anyone who knows any history, except that they have seen better days? And the landlady’s claim is not snobbish, but rather spirited; it is her testimony to the truth in the old tales of which I spoke: that she ought not to be so poor or so servile in status; that a normal person ought to have more property and more power in the State than that. Such dreams of lost dignity are perhaps the only things that stand between us and the cattle–breeding paradise now promised. Nor are such dreams by any means impotent. I remember Mr. T.P. O’Connor wrote an interesting article about Madame Humbert, in the course of which he said that Irish peasants, and probably most peasants, tended to have a half–fictitious family legend about an estate to which they were entitled. This was written in the time when Irish peasants were landless in their land; and the delusion doubtless seemed all the more entertaining to the landlords who ruled them and the money–lenders who ruled the landlords. But the dream has conquered the realities. The phantom farms have materialised. Merely by tenaciously affirming the kind of pride that comes after a fall, by remembering the old civilisation and refusing the new, by recurring to an old claim that seemed to most Englishmen like the lie of a broken–down lodging–house keeper at Margate—by all this the Irish have got what they want, in solid mud and turf.Read more at location 20407"