Without Prejudice

element of truth. The books which gain a reputation for brilliance are those which are witty at wide intervals; the writer who scintillates steadily stands in his own light.

[Sidenote: The Discount Farce]

Having started your magazine, you will begin humorously enough by affixing a mock price to it. What a strange world of make-believe it is! We are so habituated to shams that we cannot help shamming even where there is nothing to be gained by it. Why is music published at four shillings when you can buy it for one and four, or at most one and eight? Why are novels published at thirty-one and six and the magazines at a shilling? 'Shilling shockers' are sold at ninepence, which is as comical as selling 'tenpenny nails' at sixpence. The same principle rules in other trades. It almost seems as if there is an ineradicable instinct in humanity for getting things below their price, even if at more than their value. Hence the marked popularity of 'sales' and 'reductions.' The idea of getting things cheap reconciles one to getting things one doesn't want. The craze for cheap things leads one into frightful extravagance. In some shops the weakness of humanity is pandered to without disguise, and every article is ticketed with a little card, from which the first price is carefully ruled out, and even on the second price you get a discount for cash. This same discount for cash is at least intelligible, but business men are painfully familiar with another wonderful deduction. After you wait months for your money, you get a cheque less 'discount on payment.' This seems to involve an exasperating Hibernicism. 'On payment,' forsooth! So long as it remains unpaid, the debt due to you is, say, one hundred pounds. But the moment you really get it, it shrinks to ninety-five. Why not call it ninety-five at the start and be done with it? But, no! men will not give up the subtle pleasure of discounts, ineffably childish though it be. The rather deaf lady who being asked six shillings a yard for stuff replied 'Sixteen shillings a yard! I'll give you eleven,' and who, when her mistake was pointed out, said 'I couldn't think of paying more than four and sixpence' was a genuine type of the population of these islands.

[Sidenote: The Franchise Farce]

One American defense of bribery is as clever as it is cynical. It amounts to this: that universal suffrage is such a peril to the commonweal that having been given prematurely, it must insidiously be nullified in practice, even at the cost of universal corruption; in short, if the old society is to be preserved, universal franchise must be transformed into universal corruption. What an ironic commentary on the constitution that was founded by George Washington, who couldn't tell a lie! The honour of America, it appears, 'rooted in dishonour' stands, and 'faith unfaithful' makes its politicians falsely true. When one remembers some of the other gigantic evils of the society thus conserved by corruption, when one thinks of the great immoral capitalists, playing their game regardless of whom they ruin or whom they enrich, when one thinks of the squalid slums of the great cities, one wonders whether the society which these things shadow were not better damned. It were cleaner, at any rate, to abolish universal franchise than to flaunt this farce in the eyes of Europe. If universal suffrage was a mistake, if indeed the gift of the franchise does not develop a man's conscience and education-and certainly bribery is not the way to give him a chance of such development-then why not honestly admit that America has made this mistake, that the ideals of the Pilgrim Fathers were inferior to Tammany Hall's, and that even the negro is not a man and a brother?

Does our American reply that it is impossible now to take back the franchise? But on his own showing the electors merely regard it as an opportunity for extracting 'boodle.' All that would be impossible, then, is to take away this ancient concession without compensation. The electors must be bought out at the full market-value of their votes, with a few cents and corpse-revivers thrown in for their loss of amusement. At every election dollars and drinks for the ex-electors would be circulating freely under the direction of the Treasury. And, ex hypothesi, the bulk, or a number of electors sufficient to annul the danger to society, will accept the liquidation, and thus the dishonest will be honestly weeded out of the electorate. But if the cynics were wrong, and there remained among the poorer electorate men sufficiently honest to retain their votes, and sufficiently numerous to swamp the old society-why, then the devil take the old society! The object of government is only the good of the majority, and these men, being the majority, have every right to select their own form of good. If they were mistaken, nature would soon convince them of their mistake, and the next generation would profit by the object- lesson. Demos would go on, a sadder and a wiser man.

The solution of the question is that the people must not only govern: it must be fit to govern. To corrupt it with dollars, to drowse it with drink, is only to put off the inevitable day. It were far wiser to help it to educate itself for its functions. For, if the revolutionary economic ideas that are in the air are false, they will destroy themselves. And if they are true, they have got to be realised, and will get themselves realised. No amount of corruption will save society in the long run. Meantime, either let universal suffrage operate honestly, or let it be suspended or abolished. Let even those States which have enfranchised the black man, and which now, in accordance with the deep Machiavellian principle, brazenly revealed by our American, dishonestly render his vote nugatory by a reliable inaccuracy in the counting, withdraw their spurious Christianity. A double standard of morals subtly infects the whole core of the nation. Corruption cannot be localised; it creeps and spreads through all departments of thought and action. To give with the right hand, and take away with the left in exchange for a few dollars, is a manoeuvre unworthy of a great nation. The transaction is fair; let it be above board, let it be lifted into the plane of ethics. To found society upon a farce is to lower those ideals by which, as much as by bread, a nation lives.

[Sidenote: The Modern War Farce]

The horrors of war seem to have reached the vanishing point in our latest African campaign. The smallness of the English losses is appalling. I do not see the fun of fighting (i.e., of paying taxes) if all the spice and relish is to be taken out of the results. I want more blood for my money-hecatombs of corpses. Two men killed in a whole battle? Ridiculous! If I cannot have my war at my own doors, and hear the bands and the cannon I have paid for, I must at least have sensational battle-fields-Actiums and Waterloos and Marengos. What is the use of war if it does not even serve to reduce our surplus population? Soldiering was never so healthy an occupation as to-day; one fights only a few days a year at the utmost, and if the pay is poor, so is that of the scavenger and the engine-driver and the miner, and everybody else who does the dirty work of civilisation, and does it, too, without pomp and circumstance and brass bands and laureates.

[Sidenote: Fireworks]

If people cannot do without sulphur and noise, there are always fireworks. It is difficult to imagine festivity without them, and yet there must have been a time when rockets did not rise or Catherine wheels go round. You cannot have fireworks without gunpowder, and every school-boy knows that gunpowder was only invented in-I haven't got a dictionary of dates handy. Surely we ought to let off fireworks on Roger Bacon's birthday. 'They let off fireworks when he was born,' say the French in a slyly witty proverb, which is a circumlocutory way of saying that a man won't set the Thames on fire. For 'he has not invented gunpowder' is the French equivalent for this idiom of ours, and it is obvious to the meanest intellect that a man whose birth was celebrated by fireworks could not have been the inventor of gunpowder. And yet there were fireworks of a kind from the earliest times, from the first appearance of stars in the firmament with their wandering habits and shooting expeditions. And, indeed, did not humanity long regard the heavens as a firework show for its amusement, a set piece entirely for its delectation? Mankind has always been fond of playing with fire-ever since Prometheus stole it from heaven and burnt his fingers. I am convinced the ancients only used bonfires for messages so as to enjoy the flare-up on the mountains. Who would not fight when summoned by a tongue of flame?

And the red glare on Skiddaw roused the burghers of Carlisle.

Roman candles were unknown to the Romans, but they enjoyed themselves with torches, and these were the fireworks at wedding fetes. The golden rain in which Jupiter wooed Danae was another sort of hymeneal fireworks. There were fireworks at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The love of fireworks is a natural passion. Does not nature amuse herself with fireworks, especially on tropical summer nights? She loves to flash her lightnings (which are not to be put out by the rain), and to crash her thunder (which, as everybody knows, is only the report of the meeting of two electric clouds). And who does not admire her grand pyrotechnic display-twice daily-at sunrise and at sunset, or her celebrated local effect, the Aurora Borealis? I have loved fireworks from boyhood, and would rather have had dry bread and fireworks than cake with jam. In manhood often I have listened to the long-drawn ecstatic 'aw' of the Crystal Palace crowd. I have even written a poem on fireworks. Here it is:-

A dazzling fiery show of sphery rainbows,

Whereof each wonder, monarch of a moment,

Yields up its glory to the next one's splendour,

And sadly sinks into the arms of darkness.

Is it not a true simile of the favour of the fickle crowd? The most brilliant phenomena are forgotten after a