mysterious. I may observe
here that I think there must be some mistake in the calculations of the
Socialists. They put down all our distress, not to a moral tone, but
to the chaos of private enterprise. Now, banks are private; but
post-offices are Socialistic: therefore I naturally expected that the
post-office would fall into the collectivist idea of a chorus. Judge of
my surprise when the lady in my local post-office (whom I urged to sing)
dismissed the idea with far more coldness than the bank clerk had done.
She seemed indeed, to be in a considerably greater state of depression
than he. Should any one suppose that this was the effect of the verses
themselves, it is only fair to say that the specimen verse of the
Post-Office Hymn ran thus:

"O'er London our letters are shaken like snow,
Our wires o'er the world like the thunderbolts go.
The news that may marry a maiden in Sark,
Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park."

Chorus (with a swing of joy and energy):

"Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park."

And the more I thought about the matter the more painfully certain it
seemed that the most important and typical modern things could not be
done with a chorus. One could not, for instance, be a great financier
and sing; because the essence of being a great financier is that you
keep quiet. You could not even in many modern circles be a public man
and sing; because in those circles the essence of being a public man is
that you do nearly everything in private. Nobody would imagine a chorus
of money-lenders. Every one knows the story of the solicitors' corps of
volunteers who, when the Colonel on the battlefield cried "Charge!" all
said simultaneously, "Six-and-eightpence." Men can sing while charging
in a military, but hardly in a legal sense. And at the end of my
reflections I had really got no further than the sub-conscious feeling
of my friend the bank-clerk--that there is something spiritually
suffocating about our life; not about our laws merely, but about our
life. Bank-clerks are without songs, not because they are poor, but
because they are sad. Sailors are much poorer. As I passed homewards I
passed a little tin building of some religious sort, which was shaken
with shouting as a trumpet is torn with its own tongue. THEY were
singing anyhow; and I had for an instant a fancy I had often had before:
that with us the super-human is the only place where you can find the
human. Human natu