sident of the Orange Free State hypocritical or sincere? III. Do you
think that the savages in Prusso-Portuguese East Bunyipland are as happy
and hygienic as the fortunate savages in Franco-British West Bunyipland?
IV. Did the lost Latin Charter said to have been exacted from Henry III
reserve the right of the Crown to create peers? V. What do you think of
what America thinks of what Mr. Roosevelt thinks of what Sir Eldon Gorst
thinks of the state of the Nile? VI. Detect some difference between the
two persons in frock-coats placed before you at this election."

Now, it never was supposed in any natural theory of self-government that
the ordinary man in my neighbourhood need answer fantastic questions
like these. He is a citizen of South Bucks, not an editor of 'Notes and
Queries'. He would be, I seriously believe, the best judge of whether
farmsteads or factory chimneys should adorn his own sky-line, of whether
stupid squires or clever usurers should govern his own village. But
these are precisely the things which the oligarchs will not allow him to
touch with his finger. Instead, they allow him an Imperial destiny and
divine mission to alter, under their guidance, all the things that he
knows nothing about. The name of self-government is noisy everywhere:
the Thing is throttled.

The wind sang and split the sky like thunder all the night through;
in scraps of sleep it filled my dreams with the divine discordances
of martyrdom and revolt; I heard the horn of Roland and the drums of
Napoleon and all the tongues of terror with which the Thing has gone
forth: the spirit of our race alive. But when I came down in the morning
only a branch or two was broken off the tree in my garden; and none of
the great country houses in the neighbourhood were blown down, as would
have happened if the Thing had really been abroad.

THE MAN WHO THINKS BACKWARDS

The man who thinks backwards is a very powerful person to-day: indeed,
if he is not omnipotent, he is at least omnipresent. It is he who writes
nearly all the learned books and articles, especially of the scientific
or skeptical sort; all the articles on Eugenics and Social Evolution
and Prison Reform and the Higher Criticism and all the rest of it. But
especially it is this strange and tortuous being who does most of the
writing about female emancipation and the reconsidering of marriage. For
the man who thinks backwards is very frequently a woman.

Thinking backwards is