f Coins; and he may possibly believe
you. But if you tell him afterwards that you pitied him for being
overloaded with unwieldy copper discs, and were in the act of replacing
them by a silver sixpence of your own, this further explanation, so far
from increasing his confidence in your motives, will (strangely enough)
actually decrease it. And if you are so unwise as to be struck by yet
another brilliant idea, and tell him that the pennies were all bad
pennies, which you were concealing to save him from a police prosecution
for coining, the tradesman may even be so wayward as to institute a
police prosecution himself. Now this is not in any way an exaggeration
of the way in which you have knocked the bottom out of any case you may
ever conceivably have had in such matters as the sinking of the
_Lusitania_. With my own eyes I have seen the following explanations,
apparently proceeding from your pen, (i) that the ship was a troop-ship
carrying soldiers from Canada; (ii) that if it wasn't, it was a
merchant-ship unlawfully carrying munitions for the soldiers in France;
(iii) that, as the passengers on the ship had been warned in an
advertisement, Germany was justified in blowing them to the moon; (iv)
that there were guns, and the ship had to be torpedoed because the
English captain was just going to fire them off; (v) that the English or
American authorities, by throwing the _Lusitania_ at the heads of the
German commanders, subjected them to an insupportable temptation; which
was apparently somehow demonstrated or intensified by the fact that the
ship came up to schedule time, there being some mysterious principle by
which having tea at tea-time justifies poisoning the tea; (vi) that the
ship was not sunk by the Germans at all but by the English, the English
captain having deliberately tried to drown himself and some thousand of
his own countrymen in order to cause an exchange of stiff notes between
Mr. Wilson and the Kaiser. If this interesting story be true, I can only
say that such frantic and suicidal devotion to the most remote interests
of his country almost earns the captain pardon for the crime. But do you
not see, my dear Professor, that the very richness and variety of your
inventive genius throws a doubt upon each explanation when considered in
itself? We who read you in England reach a condition of mind in which it
no longer very much matters what explanation you offer, or whether you
offer any at all. We are pr