Mod-cons are habitually cowardly and lazy, but they fancy themselves magnanimous, charitable, and wise. Whitewashing their indifferentism and chronic failure to react to grievous insults as “stateliness” and “poise” and “being the bigger man,” and all sorts of other delirious euphemisms, mod-cons have afforded radicals so much leniency in deportment and speech that radicals now believe that they can say and do anything to a retrograde without fear of reproach.
