‘No wonder the men hate you,’ she said.

‘They don’t!’ he replied. ‘And don’t fall into errors: in your sense of the word, they are NOT men. They are animals you don’t understand, and never could. Don’t thrust your illusions on other people. The masses were always the same, and will always be the same. Nero’s slaves were extremely little different from our colliers or the Ford motor–car workmen. I mean Nero’s mine slaves and his field slaves. It is the masses: they are the unchangeable. An individual may emerge from the masses. But the emergence doesn’t alter the mass. The masses are unalterable. It is one of the most momentous facts of social science. PANEM ET CIRCENSES! Only today education is one of the bad substitutes for a circus. What is wrong today is that we’ve made a profound hash of the circuses part of the programme, and poisoned our masses with a little education.’

When Clifford became really roused in his feelings about the common people, Connie was frightened. There was something devastatingly true in what he said. But it was a truth that killed.

Seeing her pale and silent, Clifford started the chair again, and no more was said till he halted again at the wood gate, which she opened.

‘And what we need to take up now,’ he said, ‘is whips, not swords. The masses have been ruled since time began, and till time ends, ruled they will have to be. It is sheer hypocrisy and farce to say they can rule themselves.’

‘But can you rule them?’ she asked.

‘I? Oh yes! Neither my mind nor my will is crippled, and I don’t rule with my legs. I can do my share of ruling: absolutely, my share; and give me a son, and he will be able to rule his portion after me.’

‘But he wouldn’t be your own son, of your own ruling class; or perhaps not,’ she stammered.

‘I don’t care who his father may be, so long as he is a healthy man not below normal intelligence. Give me the child of any healthy, normally intelligent man, and I will make a perfectly competent Chatterley of him. It is not who begets us, that matters, but where fate places us. Place any child among the ruling classes, and he will grow up, to his own extent, a ruler. Put kings’ and dukes’ children among the masses, and they’ll be little plebeians, mass products. It is the overwhelming pressure of environment.’

‘Then the common people aren’t a race, and the aristocrats aren’t blood,’ she said.

‘No, my child! All that is romantic illusion. Aristocracy is a function, a part of fate. And the masses are a functioning of another part of fate. The individual hardly matters. It is a question of which function you are brought up to and adapted to. It is not the individuals that make an aristocracy: it is the functioning of the aristocratic whole. And it is the functioning of the whole mass that makes the common man what he is.’