to know where the dismissal comes from as to know where the clerk goes to.  It may be Mr. Solomon or Mr. Solomon’s manager, or Mr. Solomon’s rich aunt in Cheltenham, or Mr. Soloman’s rich creditor in Berlin.  The elaborate machinery which was once used to make men responsible is now used solely in order to shift the responsibility.  People talk about the pride of tyrants; but we in this age are not suffering from the pride of tyrants.  We are suffering from the shyness of tyrants; from the shrinking modesty of tyrants.  Therefore we must not encourage leader-writers to be shy; we must not inflame their already exaggerated modesty.  Rather we must attempt to lure them to be vain and ostentatious; so that through ostentation they may at last find their way to honesty.

The last indictment against this book is the worst of all.  It is simply this:  that if all goes well this book will be unintelligible gibberish.  For it is mostly concerned with attacking attitudes which are in their nature accidental and incapable of enduring.  Brief as is the career of such a book as this, it may last just twenty minutes longer than most of the philosophies that it attacks.  In the end it will not matter to us whether we wrote well or ill; whether we fought with flails or reeds.  It will matter to us greatly on what side we fought.

COCKNEYS AND THEIR JOKES

A writer in the Yorkshire Evening Post is very angry indeed with my performances in this column.  His precise terms of reproach are, “Mr. G. K. Chesterton is not a humourist:  not even a Cockney humourist.”  I do not mind his saying that I am not a humourist—­in which (to tell the truth) I think he is quite right.  But I do resent his saying that I am not a Cockney.  That envenomed arrow, I admit, went home.  If a French writer said of me, “He is no metaphysician:  not even an English metaphysician,” I could swallow the insult to my metaphysics, but I should feel angry about the insult to my country.  So I do not urge that I am a humourist; but I do insist that I am a Cockney.  If I were a humourist, I should certainly be a Cockney humourist; if I were a saint, I should certainly be a Cockney saint.  I need not recite the splendid catalogue of Cockney saints who have written their names on our noble old City churches.  I need not trouble you with the long list of the Cockney humourists who have discharged their bills (or failed to discharge them) in our noble old City taverns.  We can weep together over the pathos of the poor Yorkshireman, whose county has never produced some humour not intelligible to the rest of the world.  And we can smile together when he says that somebody or other is “not even” a Cockney humourist like Samuel Johnson or Charles Lamb.  It is surely sufficiently obvious that all the best humour that exists in our language is Cockney humour.  Chaucer was a Cockney; he had his house close to the Abbey.  Dickens was a Cockney;