. He said the army he commanded was the scum of
the earth; and the remark is none the less valuable because that army
proved itself useful enough to be called the salt of the earth. But in
truth it was in this something of a national symbol and the guardian, as
it were, of a national secret. There is a paradox about the English,
even as distinct from the Irish or the Scotch, which makes any formal
version of their plans and principles inevitably unjust to them. England
not only makes her ramparts out of rubbish, but she finds ramparts in
what she has herself cast away as rubbish. If it be a tribute to a thing
to say that even its failures have been successes, there is truth in
that tribute. Some of the best colonies were convict settlements, and
might be called abandoned convict settlements. The army was largely an
army of gaol-birds, raised by gaol-delivery; but it was a good army of
bad men; nay, it was a gay army of unfortunate men. This is the colour
and the character that has run through the realities of English history,
and it can hardly be put in a book, least of all a historical book. It
has its flashes in our fantastic fiction and in the songs of the street,
but its true medium is conversation. It has no name but incongruity. An
illogical laughter survives everything in the English soul. It survived,
perhaps, with only too much patience, the time of terrorism in which the
more serious Irish rose in revolt. That time was full of a quite
topsy-turvey tyranny, and the English humorist stood on his head to suit
it. Indeed, he often receives a quite irrational sentence in a police
court by saying he will do it on his head. So, under Pitt's coercionist
regime, a man was sent to prison for saying that George IV. was fat; but
we feel he must have been partly sustained in prison by the artistic
contemplation of how fat he was. That sort of liberty, that sort of
humanity, and it is no mean sort, did indeed survive all the drift and
downward eddy of an evil economic system, as well as the dragooning of a
reactionary epoch and the drearier menace of materialistic social
science, as embodied in the new Puritans, who have purified themselves
even of religion. Under this long process, the worst that can be said is
that the English humorist has been slowly driven downwards in the social
scale. Falstaff was a knight, Sam Weller was a gentleman's servant, and
some of our recent restrictions seem designed to drive Sam Weller to the