wire; the modern gentleman who is
too lazy to daub his face with vermilion as a symbol of bravery employs
a laundress to daub his shirt with starch as a symbol of cleanliness; we
shake our heads at the dirt of the middle ages in cities made grimy with
soot and foul and disgusting with shameless tobacco smoking; holy water,
in its latest form of disinfectant fluid, is more widely used and
believed in than ever; public health authorities deliberately go through
incantations with burning sulphur (which they know to be useless)
because the people believe in it as devoutly as the Italian peasant
believes in the liquefaction of the blood of St Januarius; and
straightforward public lying has reached gigantic developments, there
being nothing to choose in this respect between the pickpocket at the
police station and the minister on the treasury bench, the editor in the
newspaper office, the city magnate advertizing bicycle tires that do not
side-slip, the clergyman subscribing the thirty-nine articles, and the
vivisector who pledges his knightly honor that no animal operated on in
the physiological laboratory suffers the slightest pain. Hypocrisy is
at its worst; for we not only persecute bigotedly but sincerely in the
name of the cure-mongering witchcraft we do believe in, but callously
and hypocritically in the name of the Evangelical creed that our rulers
privately smile at as the Italian patricians of the fifth century smiled
at Jupiter and Venus. Sport is, as it has always been, murderous
excitement; the impulse to slaughter is universal; and museums are set
up throughout the country to encourage little children and elderly
gentlemen to make collections of corpses preserved in alcohol, and to
steal birds' eggs and keep them as the red Indian used to keep scalps.
Coercion with the lash is as natural to an Englishman as it was to
Solomon spoiling Rehoboam: indeed, the comparison is unfair to the Jews
in view of the facts that the Mosaic law forbade more than forty lashes
in the name of humanity, and that floggings of a thousand lashes were
inflicted on English soldiers in the XVIII and XIX centuries, and would
be inflicted still but for the change in the balance of political power
between the military caste and the commercial classes and the
proletariat. In spite of that change, flogging is still an institution
in the public school, in the military prison, on the training ship, and
in that school of littleness called the h