arance of a policeman out of the bushes might destroy. He must act
on the impulse, because the impulse is unimportant, and he may never
have the same impulse again. If you like to put it so he must act on the
impulse because the impulse is not worth a moment's thought. All these
fancies men feel should be private; and even Fabians have never proposed
to interfere with them.

Now, for the last fortnight the newspapers have been full of very varied
comments upon the problem of the secrecy of certain parts of our
political finance, and especially of the problem of the party funds.
Some papers have failed entirely to understand what the quarrel is
about. They have urged that Irish members and Labour members are also
under the shadow, or, as some have said, even more under it. The ground
of this frantic statement seems, when patiently considered, to be simply
this: that Irish and Labour members receive money for what they do. All
persons, as far as I know, on this earth receive money for what they do;
the only difference is that some people, like the Irish members, do it.

I cannot imagine that any human being could think any other human being
capable of maintaining the proposition that men ought not to receive
money. The simple point is that, as we know that some money is given
rightly and some wrongly, an elementary common-sense leads us to look
with indifference at the money that is given in the middle of Ludgate
Circus, and to look with particular suspicion at the money which a man
will not give unless he is shut up in a box or a bathing-machine. In
short, it is too silly to suppose that anybody could ever have discussed
the desirability of funds. The only thing that even idiots could ever
have discussed is the concealment of funds. Therefore, the whole
question that we have to consider is whether the concealment of
political money-transactions, the purchase of peerages, the payment of
election expenses, is a kind of concealment that falls under any of the
three classes I have mentioned as those in which human custom and
instinct does permit us to conceal. I have suggested three kinds of
secrecy which are human and defensible. Can this institution be defended
by means of any of them?

Now the question is whether this political secrecy is of any of the
kinds that can be called legitimate. We have roughly divided legitimate
secrets into three classes. First comes the secret that is only kept in
order to be revealed, as i