der If . . ._

But I sometimes wonder if this indifference towards the facts which are
"big" to so many people and ought, perhaps, to be "big" to everybody, be
a sign of national weakness or of national strength. Personally, I
longed, metaphorically speaking, to tear that female limb from limb and
send that young man to a village under bombardment, there to make him
stay a week in the very hottest portion of Hell's Corner. But had I done
so, I realised that I should not have accomplished the very slightest
good. The moment that you take a crank seriously, from that very moment
he imagines that his "crankiness" is divinely inspired. Far better laugh
at him and let him alone. Laughter is the one unanswerable
contradiction, and ridicule is a far more deadly thing to fight against
than fury, no matter if fury wields a hatchet. Perhaps this utter
indifference to the firebrand is our national strength--even though it
comes from a too-sluggish imagination, a too great imperviousness to new
dangers. English people possess too great a sense of humour ever to
become Bolshevik. They may not be witty and vivacious and effervescingly
bright, but they possess an innate sense of the ridiculous which is their
national safeguard against any very bloody form of revolution. So we
suffer infuriated cranks--if not gladly, at least, in the same manner as
we suffer baboons in the Zoo--interesting, and even amusing in their
proper place, but to be shot at sight should they venture to play the
"baboon" amid those hideous red-brick villas which have been termed an
Englishman's castle and his home. After all, every new system has its
ridiculous side, and strangely enough, it is this ridiculous side which
is most apparent at the outset. Only after you have delved below the
"comic froth" do you begin to realise that there is a very vital truth
hidden beneath. Well, a sense of humour blows away that froth in time,
and then--as for example after the Suffragette antics--the real argument
behind the capers and the words becomes known. Thus in England all
revolutions are gradual, and in their very slowness lies their
incalculable strength of purpose.

_Types of Tub-thumpers_

But the various types of cranks always provide a psychological interest
to the student of intellectual freakishness. There are the "cranks" you
laugh at; others who make you wish to murder them outright. Then there
are a few pathetic cases--elderly men, who b