Page 144 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes
nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the
idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference
between rich and poor, as though they were two different
races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is
no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are
differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the.
average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed
in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is
the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on
equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the
trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people
who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do
mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated
people know about poverty? In my copy of Villon’s poems
the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the
line ‘NE PAIN NE VOYENT QU’AUX FENESTRES’ by a
footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man’s
experience.
From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob re-
sults quite naturally. The educated man pictures a horde
of submen, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house,
burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or
sweeping out a lavatory. ‘Anything,’ he thinks, ‘any injus-
tice, sooner than let that mob loose.’ He does not see that
since there is no difference between the mass of rich and
poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob
is in fact loose now, and—in the shape of rich men—is using

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