into exaggeration
which is the transition from life to art. But all the time I was
mesmerised by the moon; I saw all these men and women as enchanted
things. The poacher shot pheasants; the policeman tracked pheasants; the
wife hid pheasants; they were all (especially the policeman) as true
as death. But there was something more true to death than true to life
about it all: the figures were frozen with a magic frost of sleep or
fear or custom such as does not cramp the movements of the poor men of
other lands. I looked at the poacher and the policeman and the gun; then
at the gun and the policeman and the poacher; and I could find no name
for the fancy that haunted and escaped me. The poacher believed in the
Game Laws as much as the policeman. The poacher's wife not only believed
in the Game Laws, but protected them as well as him. She got a promise
from her husband that he would never shoot another pheasant. Whether he
kept it I doubt; I fancy he sometimes shot a pheasant even after that.
But I am sure he never shot a policeman. For we live in an enchanted
land.

THE SUN WORSHIPPER

There is a shrewd warning to be given to all people who are in revolt.
And in the present state of things, I think all men are revolting in
that sense; except a few who are revolting in the other sense. But the
warning to Socialists and other revolutionaries is this: that as sure as
fate, if they use any argument which is atheist or materialistic, that
argument will always be turned against them at last by the tyrant and
the slave. To-day I saw one too common Socialist argument turned Tory,
so to speak, in a manner quite startling and insane. I mean that modern
doctrine, taught, I believe, by most followers of Karl Marx, which is
called the materialist theory of history. The theory is, roughly, this:
that all the important things in history are rooted in an economic
motive. In short, history is a science; a science of the search for
food.

Now I desire, in passing only, to point out that this is not merely
untrue, but actually the reverse of the truth. It is putting it too
feebly to say that the history of man is not only economic. Man would
not have any history if he were only economic. The need for food is
certainly universal, so universal that it is not even human. Cows
have an economic motive, and apparently (I dare not say what ethereal
delicacies may be in a cow) only an economic motive. The cow eats grass
anywhere and neve