The other day I was nearly arrested by two excited policemen in a wood
in Yorkshire. I was on a holiday, and was engaged in that rich and
intricate mass of pleasures, duties, and discoveries which for the
keeping off of the profane, we disguise by the exoteric name of Nothing.
At the moment in question I was throwing a big Swedish knife at a tree,
practising (alas, without success) that useful trick of knife-throwing
by which men murder each other in Stevenson’s romances.
Suddenly the forest was full of two policemen; there was something about
their appearance in and relation to the greenwood that reminded me,
I know not how, of some happy Elizabethan comedy. They asked what the
knife was, who I was, why I was throwing it, what my address was, trade,
religion, opinions on the Japanese war, name of favourite cat, and so
on. They also said I was damaging the tree; which was, I am sorry to
say, not true, because I could not hit it. The peculiar philosophical
importance, however, of the incident was this. After some half-hour’s
animated conversation, the exhibition of an envelope, an unfinished
poem, which was read with great care, and, I trust, with some profit,
and one or two other subtle detective strokes, the elder of the two
knights became convinced that I really was what I professed to be, that
I was a journalist, that I was on the DAILY NEWS (this was the real
stroke; they were shaken with a terror common to all tyrants), that
I lived in a particular place as stated, and that I was stopping
with particular people in Yorkshire, who happened to be wealthy and
well-known in the neighbourhood.
In fact the leading constable became so genial and complimentary at last
that he ended up by representing himself as a reader of my work. And
when that was said, everything was settled. They acquitted me and let me
pass.
“But,” I said, “what of this mangled tree? It was to the rescue of that
Dryad, tethered to the earth, that you rushed like knight-errants. You,
the higher humanitarians, are not deceived by the seeming stillness
of the green things, a stillness like the stillness of the cataract, a
headlong and crashing silence. You know that a tree is but a creature
tied to the ground by one leg. You will not let assassins with their
Swedish daggers shed the green blood of such a being. But if so, why am
I not in custody; where are my gyves? Produce, from some portion of your
persons, my mouldy straw and my grated window. The facts of which I have
just convinced you, that my name is Chesterton, that I am a journalist,
that I am living with the well-known and philanthropic Mr. Blank of
Ilkley, cannot have anything to do with the question of whether I have
been guilty of cruelty to vegetables. The tree is none the less damaged
even though it may reflect with a dark pride that it was wounded by a
gentleman connected with the Liberal press. Wounds in the bark do not
more rapidly close up because they are inflicted by people who are
stopping with Mr. Blank of Ilkley. That tree, the ruin of its former
self, the wreck of what was once a giant of the forest, now splintered
and laid low by the brute superiority of a Swedish knife, that tragedy,
constable, cannot be wiped out even by stopping for several months more
with some wealthy person. It is incredible that you have no legal claim
to arrest even the most august and fashionable persons on this charge.
For if so, why did you interfere with me at all?”
I made the later and larger part of this speech to the silent wood, for
the two policemen had vanished almost as quickly as they came. It is
very possible, of course, that they were fairies. In that case the
somewhat illogical character of their view of crime, law, and personal
responsibility would find a bright and elfish explanation; perhaps if I
had lingered in the glade till moonrise I might have seen rings of tiny
policemen dancing on the sward; or running about with glow-worm belts,
arresting grasshoppers for damaging blades of grass. But taking the
bolder hypothesis, that they really were policemen, I find myself in
a certain difficulty. I was certainly accused of something which was
either an offence or was not. I was let off because I proved I was a
guest at a big house. The inference seems painfully clear; either it is
not a proof of infamy to throw a knife about in a lonely wood, or else
it is a proof of innocence to know a rich man. Suppose a very poor
person, poorer even than a journalist, a navvy or unskilled labourer,
tramping in search of work, often changing his lodgings, often, perhaps,
failing in his rent. Suppose he had been intoxicated with the green
gaiety of the ancient wood. Suppose he had thrown knives at trees and
could give no description of a dwelling-place except that he had been
fired out of the last. As I walked home through a cloudy and purple
twilight I wondered how he would have got on.
Moral. We English are always boasting that we are very illogical; there
is no great harm in that. There is no subtle spiritual evil in the fact
that people always brag about their vices; it is when they begin to brag
about their virtues that they become insufferable. But there is this to
be said, that illogicality in your constitution or your legal methods
may become very dangerous if there happens to be some great national
vice or national temptation which many take advantage of the chaos.
Similarly, a drunkard ought to have strict rules and hours; a temperate
man may obey his instincts.
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.