Sara’s Reviews > Screwtape Proposes a Toast. Illustrated > Status Update

Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma--Beelzebub, what a useful word!--by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT.

Every dictator or even demagogue--almost every film star or crooner--can now draw tens of thousands of the human sheep with him. They give themselves (what there is of them) to him; in him, to us. There may come a time when we shall have no need to bother about individual temptation at all, except for the few. Catch the bell weather, and his whole flock comes after him.