d ease as
an honoured guest in Florence. Nor is it only aristocrats who are so
favoured by English justice: everyone can remember the case of a Canon
of Westminster who was similarly warned and also escaped. We can come
down the social scale to the very bottom and find the same practice. A
certain journalist unwittingly offended a great personage. Immediately
he was warned by the police that a warrant issued against him in India
seventeen years before would at once be acted upon if he did not make
himself scarce. For some time he lived in peaceful retirement in
Belgium. Moreover, in all these cases the warrants had been issued on
the sworn complaints of the parties damnified or of their parents and
guardians: no one had complained of Oscar Wilde. Naturally I thought
the dislike of publicity which dictated such lenience to the lord and
the canon and the journalist would be even more operative in the case
of a man of genius like Oscar Wilde. In certain ways he had a greater
position than even the son of a duke: the shocking details of his
trial would have an appalling, a world-wide publicity.

Besides, I said to myself, the governing class in England is steeped
in aristocratic prejudice, and particularly when threatened by
democratic innovations, all superiorities, whether of birth or wealth,
or talent, are conscious of the same _raison d'etre_ and have the same
self-interest. The lord, the millionaire and the genius have all the
same reason for standing up for each other, and this reason is usually
effective. Everyone knows that in England the law is emphatically a
respecter of persons. It is not there to promote equality, much less
is it the defender of the helpless, the weak and the poor; it is a
rampart for the aristocracy and the rich, a whip in the hands of the
strong. It is always used to increase the effect of natural and
inherited inequality, and it is not directed by a high feeling of
justice; but perverted by aristocratic prejudice and snobbishness; it
is not higher than democratic equality, but lower and more sordid.

The case was just a case where an aristocratic society could and
should have shown its superiority over a democratic society with its
rough rule of equality. For equality is only half-way on the road to
justice. More than once the House of Commons has recognised this
fundamental truth; it condemned Clive but added that he had rendered
"great and distinguished services to his country"; and no one