tten
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.

The Field of Blood

In my daily paper this morning I read the following interesting
paragraphs, which take my mind back to an England which I do not
remember and which, therefore (perhaps), I admire.

"Nearly sixty years ago--on 4 September, 1850--the Austrian General
Haynau, who had gained an unenviable fame throughout the world by his
ferocious methods in suppressing the Hungarian revolution in 1849, while
on a visit to this country, was belaboured in the streets of London by
the draymen of Messrs. Barclay, Perkins and Co., whose brewery he had
just inspected in company of an adjutant. Popular delight was so
great that the Government of the time did not dare to prosecute the
assailants, and the General--the 'w