SNOBBERY AND TITLES
SIR,—When a controversy raged in The Times about the use of the term " Esquire," Mr. Osbert Sitwell reduced the question to the absurd by pointing out that it was not democratic for one man to be called, say, Montagu-Douglas-Scott, and another, Smith. He suggested that we should all have the same name, and that we should be given numbers to distinguish us one from the other. Sir Robert Greig's proposal seems to be another step on the road along which so many are eager to hurry us:
a road of which the end is not that true democracy in which duke dustman shall be friends, but a grey uniformity in which there shall neither duke nor dustman, only the herd-man, who will be rapped over the head if he tries to deviate from the dead level of thought action prescribed for him by bureaucracy.
As to Sir Robert Greig's other reason for the abolition of titles, so we are not so far reduced as a nation that we must seek to Will the app val of our Allies by destroying all our institutions which do not cord with their ideas. If to abolish the Peerage would please the Ameri which I take leave to doubt, would Sir Robert Greig wish to go fun and to abolish the Crown and the Established Church in order to favour with the Russians?—I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
HISTORICUS.
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