Home Secretary says
that in his opinion the police are very nice people, and there is an end
of the matter. A Member of Parliament attempts to criticise a peerage.
The Speaker says he must not criticise a peerage, and there the matter
drops.

Political liberty, let us repeat, consists in the power of
criticising those flexible parts of the State which constantly require
reconsideration, not the basis, but the machinery. In plainer words,
it means the power of saying the sort of things that a decent but
discontented citizen wants to say. He does not want to spit on the
Bible, or to run about without clothes, or to read the worst page in
Zola from the pulpit of St. Paul's. Therefore the forbidding of these
things (whether just or not) is only tyranny in a secondary and special
sense. It restrains the abnormal, not the normal man. But the normal
man, the decent discontented citizen, does want to protest against
unfair law courts. He does want to expose brutalities of the police.
He does want to make game of a vulgar pawnbroker who is made a Peer. He
does want publicly to warn people against unscrupulous capitalists and
suspicious finance. If he is run in for doing this (as he will be)
he does want to proclaim the character or known prejudices of the
magistrate who tries him. If he is sent to prison (as he will be) he
does want to have a clear and civilised sentence, telling him when he
will come out. And these are literally and exactly the things that
he now cannot get. That is the almost cloying humour of the present
situation. I can say abnormal things in modern magazines. It is the
normal things that I am not allowed to say. I can write in some solemn
quarterly an elaborate article explaining that God is the devil; I can
write in some cultured weekly an aesthetic fancy describing how I
should like to eat boiled baby. The thing I must not write is rational
criticism of the men and institutions of my country.

The present condition of England is briefly this: That no Englishman can
say in public a twentieth part of what he says in private. One cannot
say, for instance, that—But I am afraid I must leave out
that instance, because one cannot say it. I cannot prove my
case—because it is so true.

THE HYPOTHETICAL HOUSEHOLDER

We have read of some celebrated philosopher who was so absent-minded
that he paid a call at his own house. My own absent-mindedness is
extreme, and my philosophy, of course, is t