Had Benda known his history, he would have been less 
angry and less surprised. For it has always been the role of 
intelligentsia to act as liaison and as mediators between old 
and new power groups. Most familiar of such groups is the case 
of the Greek slaves, who were for long the educators and 
confidential clerks of the Roman power. And it is precisely this 
servile role of the confidential clerk to the tycoon—commercial, 
military, or political—that the educator has continued to play in 
the Western world until the present moment. In England “the 
Angries” were a group of such clerks who had suddenly 
emerged from the lower echelons by the educational escape 
hatch. As they emerged into the upper world of power, they 
found that the air was not at all fresh or bracing. But they lost 
their nerve even quicker than Bernard Shaw lost his. Like Shaw, 
they quickly settled down to whimsy and to the cultivation of 
entertainment values.