Mr Maxse's redundant abuse
in _The National Review_ seems to me to be one of the most significant
phenomena of the day. It is a symptom of the reviving taste for
looking on one's political opponent not only as a public, but as a
private, villain. There was probably never a time when it was a more
popular amusement, both in print and at the dinner table, to give a
twist of criminality to the portraiture of political enemies. When
Daniel O'Connell denounced Disraeli as "the heir-at-law of the
blasphemous thief who died on the cross," he was abusing him, not for
his home life, but as a public figure. Similarly, when Sir William
Harcourt described Mr Chamberlain as "a serpent gnawing a file," he
said nothing which would make even the most proper lady shrink from
bowing to Mr Chamberlain in the street. The modern sort of
nomenclature, however, has gone beyond this. It is a constant
suggestion that Cabinets are recruited from Pentonville and Wormwood
Scrubs. One would hardly be surprised, on meeting a Prime Minister
nowadays, to find that he had the bristly chin and the club of Bill
Sikes. As for the rank and file of Ministers, one does not insult Bill
Sikes by comparing them to him. One thinks of them rather as on the
level with racecourse sneak-thieves and the bullies of disorderly
houses. Decidedly, they are not persons to take tea with.

Calumny, of course, is as old as Adam--or, at least, as Joseph--and
one remembers that even Mr Gladstone was accused of the vulgarest
immorality till a journalist tracked him down and discovered that it
was rescue work, and not the deadly sin with the largest circulation,
which was his private hobby. That sort of libel no man can escape who
risks remaining alive. Perhaps we should come to hate our public men
as the Athenians came to hate Aristides if we could find nothing evil
to think about them. What the politician of the present day has to
fear is not an occasional high tide of calumny, or even a volley of
the old-fashioned abusive epithets, which are, so to speak, all in the
day's play. It is rather the million-eyed beast of suspicion which
democracies every now and then take to their bosoms as a pet. Often it
seems a noble beast, for it is impossible to be suspicious all the
time without sometimes suspecting the truth. Its food, however, is
neither primarily truth nor primarily falsehood; it thrives on both
indifferently. And one foresees that, during the transition stage
between th