Take some absurd anomaly in the British law—the
fact, for instance, that a man ceasing to be an M.
P. has to become Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds,
an office which I believe was intended originally
to keep down some wild robbers near Chiltern, wherever
that is. Obviously this kind of illogicality
does not matter very much, for the simple reason that
there is no great temptation to take advantage of
it. Men retiring from Parliament do not have
any furious impulse to hunt robbers in the hills.
But if there were a real danger that wise, white-haired,
venerable politicians taking leave of public life
would desire to do this (if, for instance, there were
any money in it), then clearly, if we went on saying
that the illogicality did not matter, when (as a matter
of fact) Sir Michael Hicks-Beach was hanging Chiltern
shop-keepers every day and taking their property,
we should be very silly. The illogicality would
matter, for it would have become an excuse for indulgence.
It is only the very good who can live riotous lives.
Now this is exactly what is present in cases of police
investigation such as the one narrated above.
There enters into such things a great national sin,
a far greater sin than drink—the habit of
respecting a gentleman. Snobbishness has, like
drink, a kind of grand poetry. And snobbishness
has this peculiar and devilish quality of evil, that
it is rampant among very kindly people, with open hearts
and houses. But it is our great English vice;
to be watched more fiercely than small-pox. If
a man wished to hear the worst and wickedest thing
in England summed up in casual English words, he would
not find it in any foul oaths or ribald quarrelling.
He would find it in the fact that the best kind of
working man, when he wishes to praise any one, calls
him “a gentleman.” It never occurs
to him that he might as well call him “a marquis,”
or “a privy councillor”—that
he is simply naming a rank or class, not a phrase
for a good man. And this perennial temptation
to a shameful admiration, must, and, I think, does,
constantly come in and distort and poison our police
methods.
In this case we must be logical and exact; for we
have to keep watch upon ourselves. The power
of wealth, and that power at its vilest, is increasing
in the modern world. A very good and just people,
without this temptation, might not need, perhaps, to
make clear rules and systems to guard themselves against
the power of our great financiers. But that is
because a very just people would have shot them long
ago, from mere native good feeling.
