even a thing merely suave and deprecating.  Politeness is an armed guard, stern and splendid and vigilant, watching over all the ways of men; in other words, politeness is a policeman.  A policeman is not merely a heavy man with a truncheon:  a policeman is a machine for the smoothing and sweetening of the accidents of everyday existence.  In other words, a policeman is politeness; a veiled image of politeness—­sometimes impenetrably veiled.  But my point is here that by losing the original idea of the city, which is the force and youth of both the words, both the things actually degenerate.  Our politeness loses all manliness because we forget that politeness is only the Greek for patriotism.  Our policemen lose all delicacy because we forget that a policeman is only the Greek for something civilised.  A policeman should often have the functions of a knight-errant.  A policeman should always have the elegance of a knight-errant.  But I am not sure that he would succeed any the better n remembering this obligation of romantic grace if his name were spelt phonetically, supposing that it could be spelt phonetically.  Some spelling-reformers, I am told, in the poorer parts of London do spell his name phonetically, very phonetically.  They call him a “pleeceman.”  Thus the whole romance of the ancient city disappears from the word, and the policeman’s reverent courtesy of demeanour deserts him quite suddenly.  This does seem to me the case against any extreme revolution in spelling.  If you spell a word wrong you have some temptation to think it wrong.

HUMANITARIANISM AND STRENGTH

Somebody writes complaining of something I said about progress.  I have forgotten what I said, but I am quite certain that it was (like a certain Mr. Douglas in a poem which I have also forgotten) tender and true.  In any case, what I say now is this.  Human history is so rich and complicated that you can make out a case for any course of improvement or retrogression.  I could make out that the world has been growing more democratic, for the English franchise has certainly grown more democratic.  I could also make out that the world has been growing more aristocratic, for the English Public Schools have certainly grown more aristocratic I could prove the decline of militarism by the decline of flogging; I could prove the increase of militarism by the increase of standing armies and conscription.  But I can prove anything in this way.  I can prove that the world has always been growing greener.  Only lately men have invented absinthe and the Westminster Gazette.  I could prove the world has grown less green.  There are no more Robin Hood foresters, and fields are being covered with houses.  I could show that the world was less red with khaki or more red with the new penny stamps.  But in all cases progress means progress only in some particular thing.  Have you ever noticed that strange line of Tennyson, in which he confesses, half consciously, how very conventional progress is?—­