Manchurian Books

I wonder sometimes if the etiquette of
housekeepers' rooms is as strict to-day, and what my mother would have
made of a chauffeur....
On the whole I am glad that I saw so much as I did of Bladesover--if
for no other reason than because seeing it when I did, quite naively,
believing in it thoroughly, and then coming to analyse it, has enabled
me to understand much that would be absolutely incomprehensible in the
structure of English society. Bladesover is, I am convinced, the clue to
almost all that is distinctively British and perplexing to the foreign
inquirer in England and the English-speaking peoples. Grasp firmly that
England was all Bladesover two hundred years ago; that it has had
Reform Acts indeed, and such--like changes of formula, but no essential
revolution since then; that all that is modern and different has come in
as a thing intruded or as a gloss upon this predominant formula, either
impertinently or apologetically; and you will perceive at once the
reasonableness, the necessity, of that snobbishness which is the
distinctive quality of English thought.


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