CHESTERTON-ALARM AND SIDISCUTIO - How I found the Superman
Readers of Mr. Bernard Shaw and other modern writers may be
interested to know that the Superman has been found. I found him;
he lives in South Croydon. My success will be a great blow to Mr. Shaw,
who has been following quite a false scent, and is now looking
for the creature in Blackpool; and as for Mr. Wells's notion
of generating him out of gases in a private laboratory, I always
thought it doomed to failure. I assure Mr. Wells that the Superman
at Croydon was born in the ordinary way, though he himself, of course,
is anything but ordinary.
Nor are his parents unworthy of the wonderful being whom they
have given to the world. The name of Lady Hypatia Smythe-Browne
(now Lady Hypatia Hagg) will never be forgotten in the East End,
where she did such splendid social work. Her constant cry of "Save
the children!" referred to the cruel neglect of children's eyesight
involved in allowing them to play with crudely painted toys.
She quoted unanswerable statistics to prove that children allowed
to look at violet and vermilion often suffered from failing eyesight
in their extreme old age; and it was owing to her ceaseless crusade
that the pestilence of the Monkey-on-the-Stick was almost swept
from Hoxton. The devoted worker would tramp the streets untiringly,
taking away the toys from all the poor children, who were often
moved to tears by her kindness. Her good work was interrupted,
partly by a new interest in the creed of Zoroaster, and partly
by a savage blow from an umbrella. It was inflicted by a dissolute
Irish apple-woman, who, on returning from some orgy to her ill-kept
apartment, found Lady Hypatia in the bedroom taking down an oleograph,
which, to say the least of it, could not really elevate the mind.
At this the ignorant and partly intoxicated Celt dealt the social
reformer a severe blow, adding to it an absurd accusation of theft.
The lady's exquisitely balanced mind received a shock, and it was
during a short mental illness that she married Dr. Hagg.
Of Dr. Hagg himself I hope there is no need to speak.
Any one even slightly acquainted with those daring experiments
in Neo-Individualist Eugenics, which are now the one absorbing
interest of the English democracy, must know his name and often
commend it to the personal protection of an impersonal power.
Early in life he brought to bear that ruthless insight into the history
of religions which he had gained in boyhood as an electrical engineer.
Later he became one of our greatest geologists; and achieved that bold and
bright outlook upon the future of Socialism which only geology can give.
At first there seemed something like a rift, a faint, but perceptible,
fissure, between his views and those of his aristocratic wife.
For she was in favour (to use her own powerful epigram) of protecting
the poor against themselves; while he declared pitilessly,
in a new and striking metaphor, that the weakest must go to the wall.
Eventually, however, the married pair perceived an essential union
in the unmistakably modern character of both their views, and in this
enlightening and intelligible formula their souls found peace.
The result is that this union of the two highest types of
our civilization, the fashionable lady and the all but vulgar
medical man, has been blessed by the birth of the Superman,
that being whom all the labourers in Battersea are so eagerly
expecting night and day.
I found the house of Dr. and Lady Hypatia Hagg without much difficulty;
it is situated in one of the last straggling streets of Croydon,
and overlooked by a line of poplars. I reached the door towards
the twilight, and it was natural that I should fancifully see something
dark and monstrous in the dim bulk of that house which contained
the creature who was more marvellous than the children of men.
When I entered the house I was received with exquisite courtesy
by Lady Hypatia and her husband; but I found much greater
difficulty in actually seeing the Superman, who is now about
fifteen years old, and is kept by himself in a quiet room.
Even my conversation with the father and mother did not quite
clear up the character of this mysterious being. Lady Hypatia,
who has a pale and poignant face, and is clad in those impalpable
and pathetic greys and greens with which she has brightened
so many homes in Hoxton, did not appear to talk of her offspring
with any of the vulgar vanity of an ordinary human mother.
I took a bold step and asked if the Superman was nice looking.
"He creates his own standard, you see," she replied, with a slight sigh.
"Upon that plane he is more than Apollo. Seen from our lower plane,
of course--" And she sighed again.
I had a horrible impulse, and said suddenly, "Has he got any hair?"
There was a long and painful silence, and then Dr. Hagg said smoothly:
"Everything upon that plane is different; what he has got is
not... well, not, of course, what we call hair... but--"
"Don't you think," said his wife, very softly, "don't you think
that really, for the sake of argument, when talking to the mere public,
one might call it hair?"
"Perhaps you are right," said the doctor after a few moments' reflection.
"In connexion with hair like that one must speak in parables."
"Well, what on earth is it," I asked in some irritation, "if it
isn't hair? Is it feathers?"
"Not feathers, as we understand feathers," answered Hagg in
an awful voice.
I got up in some irritation. "Can I see him, at any rate?" I asked.
"I am a journalist, and have no earthly motives except curiosity
and personal vanity. I should like to say that I had shaken hands
with the Superman."
The husband and wife had both got heavily to their feet,
and stood, embarrassed. "Well, of course, you know," said Lady Hypatia,
with the really charming smile of the aristocratic hostess.
"You know he can't exactly shake hands ... not hands, you know....
The structure, of course--"
I broke out of all social bounds, and rushed at the door of
the room which I thought to contain the incredible creature.
I burst it open; the room was pitch dark. But from in front of me
came a small sad yelp, and from behind me a double shriek.
"You have done it, now!" cried Dr. Hagg, burying his bald brow
in his hands. "You have let in a draught on him; and he is dead."
As I walked away from Croydon that night I saw men in black carrying
out a coffin that was not of any human shape. The wind wailed above me,
whirling the poplars, so that they drooped and nodded like the plumes
of some cosmic funeral. "It is, indeed," said Dr. Hagg, "the whole
universe weeping over the frustration of its most magnificent birth."
But I thought that there was a hoot of laughter in the high wail
of the wind.
Within a stone's throw of my house they are building another house.
I am glad they are building it, and I am glad it is within
a stone's throw; quite well within it, with a good catapult.
Nevertheless, I have not yet cast the first stone at the new house--
not being, strictly speaking, guiltless myself in the matter
of new houses. And, indeed, in such cases there is a strong
protest to be made. The whole curse of the last century has
been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is.
the idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other.
It is a shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of
the whole dignity of mankind. When Man is alive he stands still.
It is only when he is dead that he swings. But whenever one meets
modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing towards a madhouse,
one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape
from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists,
not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because
they have tried Individualism and found it particularly nasty.
Thus, many embrace Christian Science solely because they are quite
sick of heathen science; they are so tired of believing that
everything is matter that they will even take refuge in the revolting
fable that everything is mind. Man ought to march somewhere.
But modern man (in his sick reaction) is ready to march nowhere--
so long as it is the Other End of Nowhere.
The case of building houses is a strong instance of this.
Early in the nineteenth century our civilization chose to abandon
the Greek and medieval idea of a town, with walls, limited and defined,
with a temple for faith and a market-place for politics;
and it chose to let the city grow like a jungle with blind cruelty
and bestial unconsciousness; so that London and Liverpool are
the great cities we now see. Well, people have reacted against that;
they have grown tired of living in a city which is as dark
and barbaric as a forest only not as beautiful, and there has
been an exodus into the country of those who could afford it,
and some I could name who can't. Now, as soon as this quite
rational recoil occurred, it flew at once to the opposite extreme.
People went about with beaming faces, boasting that they
were twenty-three miles from a station. Rubbing their hands,
they exclaimed in rollicking asides that their butcher only called
once a month, and that their baker started out with fresh hot
loaves which were quite stale before they reached the table.
A man would praise his little house in a quiet valley, but gloomily admit
(with a slight shake of the head) that a human habitation on
the distant horizon was faintly discernible on a clear day.
Rival ruralists would quarrel about which had the most completely
inconvenient postal service; and there were many jealous heartburnings
if one friend found out any uncomfortable situation which the other
friend had thoughtlessly overlooked.
In the feverish summer of this fanaticism there arose the phrase
that this or that part of England is being "built over."
Now, there is not the slightest objection, in itself, to England
being built over by men, any more than there is to its being
(as it is already) built over by birds, or by squirrels, or by spiders.
But if birds' nests were so thick on a tree that one could see nothing
but nests and no leaves at all, I should say that bird civilization
was becoming a bit decadent. If whenever I tried to walk down the road
I found the whole thoroughfare one crawling carpet of spiders,
closely interlocked, I should feel a distress verging on distaste.
If one were at every turn crowded, elbowed, overlooked, overcharged,
sweated, rack-rented, swindled, and sold up by avaricious and
arrogant squirrels, one might at last remonstrate. But the great towns
have grown intolerable solely because of such suffocating vulgarities
and tyrannies. It is not humanity that disgusts us in the huge cities;
it is inhumanity. It is not that there are human beings;
but that they are not treated as such. We do not, I hope, dislike men
and women; we only dislike their being made into a sort of jam:
crushed together so that they are not merely powerless but shapeless.
It is not the presence of people that makes London appalling.
It is merely the absence of The People.
Therefore, I dance with joy to think that my part of England
is being built over, so long as it is being built over in
a human way at human intervals and in a human proportion.
So long, in short, as I am not myself built over, like a pagan
slave buried in the foundations of a temple, or an American clerk
in a star-striking pagoda of flats, I am delighted to see the faces
and the homes of a race of bipeds, to which I am not only attracted
by a strange affection, but to which also (by a touching coincidence)
I actually happen to belong. I am not one desiring deserts.
I am not Timon of Athens; if my town were Athens I would stay in it.
I am not Simeon Stylites; except in the mournful sense that every
Saturday I find myself on the top of a newspaper column.
I am not in the desert repenting of some monstrous sins;
at least, I am repenting of them all right, but not in the desert.
I do not want the nearest human house to be too distant to see; that is
my objection to the wilderness. But neither do I want the nearest human
house to be too close to see; that is my objection to the modern city.
I love my fellow-man; I do not want him so far off that I can
only observe anything of him through a telescope, nor do I want
him so close that I can examine parts of him with a microscope.
I want him within a stone's throw of me; so that whenever it is
really necessary, I may throw the stone.
Perhaps, after all, it may not be a stone. Perhaps, after all,
it may be a bouquet, or a snowball, or a firework, or a Free Trade Loaf;
perhaps they will ask for a stone and I shall give them bread.
But it is essential that they should be within reach: how can I
love my neighbour as myself if he gets out of range for snowballs?
There should be no institution out of the reach of an indignant
or admiring humanity. I could hit the nearest house quite well
with the catapult; but the truth is that the catapult belongs to a
little boy I know, and, with characteristic youthful 'selfishness,
he has taken it away.
The preceding essay is about a half-built house upon my
private horizon; I wrote it sitting in a garden-chair; and as,
though it was a week ago, I have scarcely moved since then
(to speak of), I do not see why I should not go on writing about it.
Strictly speaking, I have moved; I have even walked across a field--
a field of turf all fiery in our early summer sunlight--and studied
the early angular red skeleton which has turned golden in the sun.
It is odd that the skeleton of a house is cheerful when the skeleton
of a man is mournful, since we only see it after the man is destroyed.
At least, we think the skeleton is mournful; the skeleton himself
does not seem to think so. Anyhow, there is something strangely
primary and poetic about this sight of the scaffolding and main
lines of a human building; it is a pity there is no scaffolding
round a human baby. One seems to see domestic life as the daring
and ambitious thing that it is, when one looks at those open staircases
and empty chambers, those spirals of wind and open halls of sky.
Ibsen said that the art of domestic drama was merely to knock one wall
out of the four walls of a drawing-room. I find the drawing-room
even more impressive when all four walls are knocked out.
I have never understood what people mean by domesticity
being tame; it seems to me one of the wildest of adventures.
But if you wish to see how high and harsh and fantastic an adventure
it is, consider only the actual structure of a house itself.
A man may march up in a rather bored way to bed; but at least
he is mounting to a height from which he could kill himself.
Every rich, silent, padded staircase, with banisters of oak,
stair-rods of brass, and busts and settees on every landing,
every such staircase is truly only an awful and naked ladder
running up into the Infinite to a deadly height. The millionaire
who stumps up inside the house is really doing the same thing
as the tiler or roof-mender who climbs up outside the house;
they are both mounting up into the void. They are both making an
escalade of the intense inane. Each is a sort of domestic mountaineer;
he is reaching a point from which mere idle falling will kill a man;
and life is always worth living while men feel that they may die.
I cannot understand people at present making such a fuss about
flying ships and aviation, when men ever since Stonehenge and
the Pyramids have done something so much more wild than flying.
A grasshopper can go astonishingly high up in the air, his
biological limitation and weakness is that he cannot stop there.
Hosts of unclean birds and crapulous insects can pass through the sky,
but they cannot pass any communication between it and the earth.
But the army of man has advanced vertically into infinity,
and not been cut off. It can establish outposts in the ether,
and yet keep open behind it its erect and insolent road.
It would be grand (as in Jules Verne) to fire a cannon-ball at the moon;
but would it not be grander to build a railway to the moon?
Yet every building of brick or wood is a hint of that high railroad;
every chimney points to some star, and every tower is a Tower
of Babel. Man rising on these awful and unbroken wings of stone
seems to me more majestic and more mystic than man fluttering
for an instant on wings of canvas and sticks of steel. How sublime
and, indeed, almost dizzy is the thought of these veiled ladders
on which we all live, like climbing monkeys! Many a black-coated
clerk in a flat may comfort himself for his sombre garb by
reflecting that he is like some lonely rook in an immemorial elm.
Many a wealthy bachelor on the top floor of a pile of mansions
should look forth at morning and try (if possible) to feel like
an eagle whose nest just clings to the edge of some awful cliff.
How sad that the word "giddy" is used to imply wantonness or levity!
It should be a high compliment to a man's exalted spirituality
and the imagination to say he is a little giddy.
I strolled slowly back across the stretch of turf by the sunset,
a field of the cloth of gold. As I drew near my own house,
its huge size began to horrify me; and when I came to the porch of it
I discovered with an incredulity as strong as despair that my house
was actually bigger than myself. A minute or two before there
might well have seemed to be a monstrous and mythical competition
about which of the two should swallow the other. But I was Jonah;
my house was the huge and hungry fish; and even as its jaws darkened
and closed about me I had again this dreadful fancy touching the dizzy
altitude of all the works of man. I climbed the stairs stubbornly,
planting each foot with savage care, as if ascending a glacier.
When I got to a landing I was wildly relieved, and waved my hat.
The very word "landing" has about it the wild sound of some one washed
up by the sea. I climbed each flight like a ladder in naked sky.
The walls all round me failed and faded into infinity; I went up
the ladder to my bedroom as Montrose went up the ladder to the gallows;
sic itur ad astro. Do you think this is a little fantastic--
even a little fearful and nervous? Believe me, it is only one of
the wild and wonderful things that one can learn by stopping at home.
Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of people in this world.
The first kind of people are People; they are the largest and probably
the most valuable class. We owe to this class the chairs we sit down on,
the clothes we wear, the houses we live in; and, indeed (when we
come to think of it), we probably belong to this class ourselves.
The second class may be called for convenience the Poets;
they are often a nuisance to their families, but, generally speaking,
a blessing to mankind. The third class is that of the Professors
or Intellectuals; sometimes described as the thoughtful people;
and these are a blight and a desolation both to their families and
also to mankind. Of course, the classification sometimes overlaps,
like all classification. Some good people are almost poets and
some bad poets are almost professors. But the division follows
lines of real psychological cleavage. I do not offer it lightly.
It has been the fruit of more than eighteen minutes of earnest
reflection and research.
The class called People (to which you and I, with no little pride,
attach ourselves) has certain casual, yet profound, assumptions,
which are called "commonplaces," as that children are charming,
or that twilight is sad and sentimental, or that one man fighting
three is a fine sight. Now, these feelings are not crude;
they are not even simple. The charm of children is very subtle;
it is even complex, to the extent of being almost contradictory.
It is, at its very plainest, mingled of a regard for hilarity and a
regard for helplessness. The sentiment of twilight, in the vulgarest
drawing-room song or the coarsest pair of sweethearts, is, so far
as it goes, a subtle sentiment. It is strangely balanced between
pain and pleasure; it might also be called pleasure tempting pain.
The plunge of impatient chivalry by which we all admire a man
fighting odds is not at all easy to define separately, it means
many things, pity, dramatic surprise, a desire for justice, a delight
in experiment and the indeterminate. The ideas of the mob are really
very subtle ideas; but the mob does not express them subtly.
In fact, it does not express them at all, except on those occasions
(now only too rare) when it indulges in insurrection and massacre.
Now, this accounts for the otherwise unreasonable fact of the existence
of Poets. Poets are those who share these popular sentiments,
but can so express them that they prove themselves the strange
and delicate things that they really are. Poets draw out the shy
refinement of the rabble. Where the common man covers the queerest
emotions by saying, "Rum little kid," Victor Hugo will write "L'art
d'etre grand-pere"; where the stockbroker will only say abruptly,
"Evenings closing in now," Mr. Yeats will write "Into the twilight";
where the navvy can only mutter something about pluck and being
"precious game," Homer will show you the hero in rags in his own hall
defying the princes at their banquet. The Poets carry the popular
sentiments to a keener and more splendid pitch; but let it always be
remembered that it is the popular sentiments that they are carrying.
No man ever wrote any good poetry to show that childhood was shocking,
or that twilight was gay and farcical, or that a man was
contemptible because he had crossed his single sword with three.
The people who maintain this are the Professors, or Prigs.
The Poets are those who rise above the people by understanding them.
Of course, most of the Poets wrote in prose--Rabelais, for instance,
and Dickens. The Prigs rise above the people by refusing
to understand them: by saying that all their dim, strange
preferences are prejudices and superstitions. The Prigs make
the people feel stupid; the Poets make the people feel wiser
than they could have imagined that they were. There are many
weird elements in this situation. The oddest of all perhaps
is the fate of the two factors in practical politics. The Poets
who embrace and admire the people are often pelted with stones
and crucified. The Prigs who despise the people are often loaded
with lands and crowned. In the House of Commons, for instance,
there are quite a number of prigs, but comparatively few poets.
There are no People there at all.
By poets, as I have said, I do not mean people who write poetry,
or indeed people who write anything. I mean such people as,
having culture and imagination, use them to understand and share
the feelings of their fellows; as against those who use them
to rise to what they call a higher plane. Crudely, the poet
differs from the mob by his sensibility; the professor differs
from the mob by his insensibility. He has not sufficient
finesse and sensitiveness to sympathize with the mob. His only
notion is coarsely to contradict it, to cut across it, in
accordance with some egotistical plan of his own; to tell
himself that, whatever the ignorant say, they are probably wrong.
He forgets that ignorance often has the exquisite intuitions of
innocence.
Let me take one example which may mark out the outline of the contention.
Open the nearest comic paper and let your eye rest lovingly upon
a joke about a mother-in-law. Now, the joke, as presented for
the populace, will probably be a simple joke; the old lady will be
tall and stout, the hen-pecked husband will be small and cowering.
But for all that, a mother-in-law is not a simple idea.
She is a very subtle idea. The problem is not that she is big
and arrogant; she is frequently little and quite extraordinarily nice.
The problem of the mother-in-law is that she is like the twilight:
half one thing and half another. Now, this twilight truth,
this fine and even tender embarrassment, might be rendered,
as it really is, by a poet, only here the poet would have to be
some very penetrating and sincere novelist, like George Meredith,
or Mr. H. G. Wells, whose "Ann Veronica" I have just been reading
with delight. I would trust the fine poets and novelists
because they follow the fairy clue given them in Comic Cuts.
But suppose the Professor appears, and suppose he says (as he almost
certainly will), "A mother-in-law is merely a fellow-citizen.
Considerations of sex should not interfere with comradeship.
Regard for age should not influence the intellect. A mother-in-law
is merely Another Mind. We should free ourselves from these tribal
hierarchies and degrees." Now, when the Professor says this
(as he always does), I say to him, "Sir, you are coarser than Comic Cuts.
You are more vulgar and blundering than the most elephantine
music-hall artiste. You are blinder and grosser than the mob.
These vulgar knockabouts have, at least, got hold of a social shade
and real mental distinction, though they can only express it clumsily.
You are so clumsy that you cannot get hold of it at all.
If you really cannot see that the bridegroom's mother and the bride
have any reason for constraint or diffidence, then you are neither
polite nor humane: you have no sympathy in you for the deep
and doubtful hearts of human folk." It is better even to put
the difficulty as the vulgar put it than to be pertly unconscious
of the difficulty altogether.
The same question might be considered well enough in the old
proverb that two is company and three is none. This proverb
is the truth put popularly: that is, it is the truth put wrong.
Certainly it is untrue that three is no company. Three is
splendid company: three is the ideal number for pure comradeship:
as in the Three Musketeers. But if you reject the proverb altogether;
if you say that two and three are the same sort of company;
if you cannot see that there is a wider abyss between two
and three than between three and three million--then I regret
to inform you that you belong to the Third Class of human beings;
that you shall have no company either of two or three, but shall
be alone in a howling desert till you die.
The other day on a stray spur of the Chiltern Hills I
climbed up upon one of those high, abrupt, windy churchyards
from which the dead seem to look down upon all the living.
It was a mountain of ghosts as Olympus was a mountain of gods.
In that church lay the bones of great Puritan lords, of a time when most
of the power of England was Puritan, even of the Established Church.
And below these uplifted bones lay the huge and hollow valleys
of the English countryside, where the motors went by every now
and then like meteors, where stood out in white squares and oblongs
in the chequered forest many of the country seats even of those
same families now dulled with wealth or decayed with Toryism.
And looking over that deep green prospect on that luminous
yellow evening, a lovely and austere thought came into my mind,
a thought as beautiful as the green wood and as grave as the tombs.
The thought was this: that I should like to go into Parliament,
quarrel with my party, accept the Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds,
and then refuse to give it up.
We are so proud in England of our crazy constitutional anomalies
that I fancy that very few readers indeed will need to be told
about the Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds. But in case there
should be here or there one happy man who has never heard of such
twisted tomfooleries, I will rapidly remind you what this legal
fiction is. As it is quite a voluntary, sometimes even an eager,
affair to get into Parliament, you would naturally suppose
that it would be also a voluntary matter to get out again.
You would think your fellow-members would be indifferent,
or even relieved to see you go; especially as (by another exercise
of the shrewd, illogical old English common sense) they have carefully
built the room too small for the people who have to sit in it.
But not so, my pippins, as it says in the "Iliad." If you are
merely a member of Parliament (Lord knows why) you can't resign.
But if you are a Minister of the Crown (Lord knows why) you can.
It is necessary to get into the Ministry in order to get out
of the House; and they have to give you some office that doesn't
exist or that nobody else wants and thus unlock the door.
So you go to the Prime Minister, concealing your air of fatigue,
and say, "It has been the ambition of my life to be Steward of the
Chiltern Hundreds." The Prime Minister then replies, "I can imagine
no man more fitted both morally and mentally for that high office."
He then gives it you, and you hurriedly leave, reflecting how
the republics of the Continent reel anarchically to and fro for lack
of a little solid English directness and simplicity.
Now, the thought that struck me like a thunderbolt as I sat on
the Chiltern slope was that I would like to get the Prime Minister
to give me the Chiltern Hundreds, and then startle and disturb him
by showing the utmost interest in my work. I should profess a general
knowledge of my duties, but wish to be instructed in the details.
I should ask to see the Under-Steward and the Under-Under-Steward,
and all the fine staff of experienced permanent officials who are
the glory of this department. And, indeed, my enthusiasm would
not be wholly unreal. For as far as I can recollect the original
duties of a Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds were to put down
the outlaws and brigands in that part of the world. Well, there are
a great many outlaws and brigands in that part of the world still,
and though their methods have so largely altered as to require
a corresponding alteration in the tactics of the Steward, I do
not see why an energetic and public-spirited Steward should not
nab them yet.
For the robbers have not vanished from the old high forests
to the west of the great city. The thieves have not vanished;
they have grown so large that they are invisible. You do not
see the word "Asia" written across a map of that neighbourhood;
nor do you see the word "Thief" written across the countrysides
of England; though it is really written in equally large letters.
I know men governing despotically great stretches of that country,
whose every step in life has been such that a slip would have sent
them to Dartmoor; but they trod along the high hard wall between right
and wrong, the wall as sharp as a swordedge, as softly and craftily
and lightly as a cat. The vastness of their silent violence itself
obscured what they were at; if they seem to stand for the rights
of property it is really because they have so often invaded them.
And if they do not break the laws, it is only because they make them.
But after all we only need a Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds
who really understands cats and thieves. Men hunt one animal
differently from another; and the rich could catch swindlers
as dexterously as they catch otters or antlered deer if they
were really at all keen upon doing it. But then they never have
an uncle with antlers; nor a personal friend who is an otter.
When some of the great lords that lie in the churchyard behind me
went out against their foes in those deep woods beneath I wager
that they had bows against the bows of the outlaws, and spears against
the spears of the robber knights. They knew what they were about;
they fought the evildoers of their age with the weapons of their age.
If the same common sense were applied to commercial law,
in forty-eight hours it would be all over with the American Trusts
and the African forward finance. But it will not be done:
for the governing class either does not care, or cares very much,
for the criminals, and as for me, I had a delusive opportunity
of being Constable of Beaconsfield (with grossly inadequate powers),
but I fear I shall never really be Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds.
CHESTERTON-ALARM AND SIDISCUTIO - How I found the Superman