I

THE TREATY OF PEACE

49

servants, upstairs and backstairs and behind-stairs, expressed in limited circles.

Those who live in the limited circles andshare the inside opinion pay both too muchand too little attention to the outside opinion;too much, because, ready in words and promisesto concede to it everything, they regard openopposition as absurdly futile; too little, becausethey believe that these words and promisesare so certainly destined to change in dueseason, that it is pedantic, tiresome, and in-appropriate to analyse their literal meaningand exact consequences. They know all thisnearly as well as the critic, who wastes, in theirview, his time and his emotions in excitinghimself too much over what, on his own show-ing, cannot possibly happen. Nevertheless,what is said before the world, is still of deeperconsequence than the subterranean breathingsand well-informed whisperings, knowledge ofwhich allows inside opinion to feel superior tooutside opinion, even at the moment of bowingto it.

But there is a further complication. InEngland (and perhaps elsewhere also) thereare two outside opinions, that which is ex-pressed in the newspapers and that which themass of ordinary men privately suspect to betrue. These two degrees of the outsideopinion are much nearer to one another thanthey are to the inside, and under some aspectsthey are identical; yet there is under the sur-face a real difference between the dogmatism