Some Policemen and a Moral - Page 2

vegetables. The tree is none
the less damaged even though it may reflect with a dark pride that it
was wounded by a gentleman connected with the Liberal press.
Wounds in the bark do not more rapidly close up because they are
inflicted by people who are stopping with Mr. Blank of Ilkley.
That tree, the ruin of its former self, the wreck of what was once
a giant of the forest, now splintered and laid low by the brute
superiority of a Swedish knife, that tragedy, constable, cannot be wiped
out even by stopping for several months more with some wealthy person.
It is incredible that you have no legal claim to arrest
even the most august and fashionable persons on this charge.
For if so, why did you interfere with me at all?"

I made the later and larger part of this speech to the silent wood,
for the two policemen had vanished almost as quickly as they came.
It is very possible, of course, that they were fairies.
In that case the somewhat illogical character of their view
of crime, law, and personal responsibility would find a bright
and elfish explanation; perhaps if I had lingered in the glade
till moonrise I might have seen rings of tiny policemen
dancing on the sward; or running about with glow-worm belts,
arresting grasshoppers for damaging blades of grass.
But taking the bolder hypothesis, that they really were policemen,
I find myself in a certain difficulty. I was certainly
accused of something which was either an offence or was not.
I was let off because I proved I was a guest at a big house.
The inference seems painfully clear; either it is not
a proof of infamy to throw a knife about in a lonely wood,
or else it is a proof of innocence to know a rich man.
Suppose a very poor person, poorer even than a journalist,
a navvy or unskilled labourer, tramping in search of work,
often changing his lodgings, often, perhaps, failing in his rent.
Suppose he had been intoxicated with the green gaiety
of the ancient wood. Suppose he had thrown knives at trees
and could give no description of a dwelling-place except
that he had been fired out of the last. As I walked home
through a cloudy and purple twilight I wondered how he would
have got on.

Moral. We English are always boasting that we are very illogical;
there is no great harm in that. There is no subtle spiritual evil
in the fact that people always brag about their vices; it is when they
begin to brag about their virtues that they become insufferable.
But there is this to be said, that illogicality in your constitution
or your legal methods may become very dangerous if there happens to be
some great national vice or national temptation which many take advantage
of the chaos. Similarly, a drunkard ought to have strict rules and