most cultured
observer. When England was agitated, previous to the last General
Election, about the existence of Chinese labour, there was a distinct
difference between the tone of the politicians and the tone of the
populace. The politicians who disapproved of Chinese labour were most
careful to explain that they did not in any sense disapprove of Chinese.
According to them, it was a pure question of legal propriety, of whether
certain clauses in the contract of indenture were not inconsistent with
our constitutional traditions: according to them, the case would have
been the same if the people had been Kaffirs or Englishmen. It all
sounded wonderfully enlightened and lucid; and in comparison the popular
joke looked, of course, very poor. For the popular joke against the
Chinese labourers was simply that they were Chinese; it was an objection
to an alien type; the popular papers were full of gibes about pigtails
and yellow faces. It seemed that the Liberal politicians were raising an
intellectual objection to a doubtful document of State; while it seemed
that the Radical populace were merely roaring with idiotic laughter at
the sight of a Chinaman's clothes. But the popular instinct was
justified, for the vices revealed were Chinese vices.

But there is another case more pleasant and more up to date. The popular
papers always persisted in representing the New Woman or the
Suffragette as an ugly woman, fat, in spectacles, with bulging clothes,
and generally falling off a bicycle. As a matter of plain external fact,
there was not a word of truth in this. The leaders of the movement of
female emancipation are not at all ugly; most of them are
extraordinarily good-looking. Nor are they at all indifferent to art or
decorative costume; many of them are alarmingly attached to these
things. Yet the popular instinct was right. For the popular instinct was
that in this movement, rightly or wrongly, there was an element of
indifference to female dignity, of a quite new willingness of women to
be grotesque. These women did truly despise the pontifical quality of
woman. And in our streets and around our Parliament we have seen the
stately woman of art and culture turn into the comic woman of _Comic
Bits_. And whether we think the exhibition justifiable or not, the
prophecy of the comic papers is justified: the healthy and vulgar masses
were conscious of a hidden enemy to their traditions who has now come
out into the daylight, that