One point, peculiarly English, he used again and again.

“So long as substantial justice is done,” he said, “it is all we care about.”

“Substantial justice will never be done,” I cried, “so long as that is your ideal.  Your arrow can never go quite so high as it is aimed.”  But I got no further.

If Oscar Wilde had been a general or a so-called empire builder, The Times might have affronted public opinion and called attention to his virtues, and argued that they should be taken in extenuation of his offences; but as he was only a writer no one seemed to owe him anything or to care what became of him.

Mr. Walter was fair-minded in comparison with most men of his class.  There was staying with him at this very time an Irish gentleman, who listened to my pleading for Wilde with ill-concealed indignation.  Excited by Arthur Walter’s obstinacy to find fresh arguments, I pointed out that Wilde’s offence was pathological and not criminal and would not be punished in a properly constituted state.

“You admit,” I said, “that we punish crime to prevent it spreading; wipe this sin off the statute book and you would not increase the sinners by one:  then why punish them?”

“Oi’d whip such sinners to death, so I would,” cried the Irishman; “hangin’s too good for them.”

“You only punished lepers,” I went on, “in the middle ages, because you believed that leprosy was catching:  this malady is not even catching.”

“Faith, Oi’d punish it with extermination,” cried the Irishman.

Exasperated by the fact that his idiot prejudice was hurting my friend, I said at length with a smile: 

“You are very bitter:  I’m not; you see, I have no sexual jealousy to inflame me.”

On this Mr. Walter had to interfere between us to keep the peace, but the mischief was done:  my advocacy remained without effect.

It is very curious how deep-rooted and enduring is the prejudice against writers in England.  Not only is no attempt made to rate them at their true value, at the value which posterity puts upon their work; but they are continually treated as outcasts and denied the most ordinary justice.  The various trials of Oscar Wilde are to the thinker an object lesson in the force of this prejudice, but some may explain the prejudice against Wilde on the score of the peculiar abhorrence with which the offence ascribed to him is regarded in England.

Let me take an example from the papers of to-day—­I am writing in January, 1910.  I find in my Daily Mail that at Bow Street police court a London magistrate, Sir Albert de Rutzen, ordered the destruction of 272 volumes of the English translation of Balzac’s “Les Contes Drolatiques” on the ground that the book was obscene.  “Les Contes Drolatiques” is an acknowledged masterpiece, and is not nearly so free spoken as “Lear” or “Hamlet” or “Tom Jones” or “Anthony and Cleopatra.”  What