ian
art, in which saints were shown brandishing as weapons the very tools
that had slain them. And because his martyrdom is thus a power to the
martyr, modern people think that any one who makes himself slightly
uncomfortable in public will immediately be uproariously popular. This
element of inadequate martyrdom is not true only of the Suffragettes; it
is true of many movements I respect and some that I agree with. It was
true, for instance, of the Passive Resisters, who had pieces of their
furniture sold up. The assumption is that if you show your ordinary
sincerity (or even your political ambition) by being a nuisance to
yourself as well as to other people, you will have the strength of the
great saints who passed through the fire. Any one who can be hustled in
a hall for five minutes, or put in a cell for five days, has achieved
what was meant by martyrdom, and has a halo in the Christian art of the
future. Miss Pankhurst will be represented holding a policeman in each
hand--the instruments of her martyrdom. The Passive Resister will be
shown symbolically carrying the teapot that was torn from him by
tyrannical auctioneers.

But there is a fallacy in this analogy of martyrdom. The truth is that
the special impressiveness which does come from being persecuted only
happens in the case of extreme persecution. For the fact that the modern
enthusiast will undergo some inconvenience for the creed he holds only
proves that he does hold it, which no one ever doubted. No one doubts
that the Nonconformist minister cares more for Nonconformity than he
does for his teapot. No one doubts that Miss Pankhurst wants a vote more
than she wants a quiet afternoon and an armchair. All our ordinary
intellectual opinions are worth a bit of a row: I remember during the
Boer War fighting an Imperialist clerk outside the Queen's Hall, and
giving and receiving a bloody nose; but I did not think it one of the
incidents that produce the psychological effect of the Roman
amphitheatre or the stake at Smithfield. For in that impression there is
something more than the mere fact that a man is sincere enough to give
his time or his comfort. Pagans were not impressed by the torture of
Christians merely because it showed that they honestly held their
opinion; they knew that millions of people honestly held all sorts of
opinions. The point of such extreme martyrdom is much more subtle. It is
that it gives an appearance of a man having something quite