more of a coward. The rich publisher may treat the poor poet
better or worse than the old master workman treated the old apprentice.
But the apprentice ran away and the master ran after him. Nowadays it is
the poet who pursues and tries in vain to fix the fact of
responsibility. It is the publisher who runs away. The clerk of Mr.
Solomon gets the sack: the beautiful Greek slave of the Sultan Suliman
also gets the sack; or the sack gets her. But though she is concealed
under the black waves of the Bosphorus, at least her destroyer is not
concealed. He goes behind golden trumpets riding on a white elephant.
But in the case of the clerk it is almost as difficult to know where the
dismissal comes from as to know where the clerk goes to. It may be Mr.
Solomon or Mr. Solomon's manager, or Mr. Solomon's rich aunt in
Cheltenham, or Mr. Soloman's rich creditor in Berlin. The elaborate
machinery which was once used to make men responsible is now used solely
in order to shift the responsibility. People talk about the pride of
tyrants; but we in this age are not suffering from the pride of tyrants.
We are suffering from the shyness of tyrants; from the shrinking
modesty of tyrants. Therefore we must not encourage leader-writers to
be shy; we must not inflame their already exaggerated modesty. Rather we
must attempt to lure them to be vain and ostentatious; so that through
ostentation they may at last find their way to honesty.

The last indictment against this book is the worst of all. It is simply
this: that if all goes well this book will be unintelligible gibberish.
For it is mostly concerned with attacking attitudes which are in their
nature accidental and incapable of enduring. Brief as is the career of
such a book as this, it may last just twenty minutes longer than most of
the philosophies that it attacks. In the end it will not matter to us
whether we wrote well or ill; whether we fought with flails or reeds. It
will matter to us greatly on what side we fought.

COCKNEYS AND THEIR JOKES

A writer in the _Yorkshire Evening Post_ is very angry indeed with my
performances in this column. His precise terms of reproach are, "Mr. G.
K. Chesterton is not a humourist: not even a Cockney humourist." I do
not mind his saying that I am not a humourist--in which (to tell the
truth) I think he is quite right. But I do resent his saying that I am
not a Cockney. That envenomed arrow, I admit, went home. If a French
writer said