ot fit himself to existing
conditions, he denounces the conditions as unfit. History is like some
deeply planted tree which, though gigantic in girth, tapers away at
last into tiny twigs; and we are in the topmost branches. Each of us is
trying to bend the tree by a twig: to alter England through a distant
colony, or to capture the State through a small State department, or to
destroy all voting through a vote. In all such bewilderment he is wise
who resists this temptation of trivial triumph or surrender, and happy
(in an echo of the Roman poet) who remembers the roots of things.

THE NAMELESS MAN

There are only two forms of government the monarchy or personal
government, and the republic or impersonal government. England is not a
government; England is an anarchy, because there are so many kings.
But there is one real advantage (among many real disadvantages) in the
method of abstract democracy, and that is this: that under impersonal
government politics are so much more personal. In France and America,
where the State is an abstraction, political argument is quite full
of human details—some might even say of inhuman details. But in
England, precisely because we are ruled by personages, these personages
do not permit personalities. In England names are honoured, and
therefore names are suppressed. But in the republics, in France
especially, a man can put his enemies' names into his article and his
own name at the end of it.

This is the essential condition of such candour. If we merely made our
anonymous articles more violent, we should be baser than we are now. We
should only be arming masked men with daggers instead of cudgels. And I,
for one, have always believed in the more general signing of articles,
and have signed my own articles on many occasions when, heaven knows,
I had little reason to be vain of them. I have heard many arguments for
anonymity; but they all seem to amount to the statement that anonymity
is safe, which is just what I complain of. In matters of truth the fact
that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a
proof that you ought to publish it.

But there is one answer to my perpetual plea for a man putting his name
to his writing. There is one answer, and there is only one answer, and
it is never given. It is that in the modern complexity very often a
man's name is almost as false as his pseudonym. The prominent person
today is eternally trying to lose a