be 'divine') from that general
contribution to the public wisdom in which journalists make so brave a
show. He may, if he have the singular luck to be a Laureate, be allowed
to strike his lyre and sing of an _accouchement_; this being about the
only event on which politicians and journalists have not yet claimed the
monopoly of offering practical advice. But farther he may hardly go: and
all because a silly assertion has been repeated until second-rate minds
confuse it with an axiom. People of a certain class of mind seem capable
of believing anything they see in print, provided they see it often.
For these, the announcement that somebody's lung tonic possesses a
peculiar virtue has only to be repeated at intervals along a railway line,
and with each repetition the assurance becomes more convincing, until
towards the journey's end it wears the imperativeness almost of a revealed
truth. And yet no reasonable inducement to belief has been added by any
one of these repetitions. The whole thing is a psychological trick.
The moral impressiveness of the first placard beyond Westbourne Park
Station depends entirely on whether you are travelling from London to
Birmingham, or from Birmingham to London. A mind which yields itself to
this illusion could probably, with perseverance, be convinced that pale
pills are worth a guinea a box for pink people, were anyone interested in
enforcing such a harmless proposition: and I have no doubt that the Man in
the Street has long since accepted the reiterated axiom that a poet should
hold aloof from public affairs, having no more capacity than a child for
understanding their drift.

Yet, as a matter of fact, the cry is just a cant party trick, used by each
party in its turn. Mr. Kipling writes "Cleared," Mr. Alfred Austin hymns
"Jameson's Ride," and forthwith the Liberals lift hands and voices in
horror. Mr. Watson denounces the Armenian massacres or the Boer War, and
the Unionists can hardly find words to express their pained surprise.
Mr. Swinburne inveighed against Irishmen, and delighted a party; inveighed
against the Czar, and divided a whole Front Bench between shocked
displeasure and half-humorous astonishment that a poet should have any
opinions about Russia, or, having some, should find anybody to take them
seriously. It is all cant, my friends--nothing but cant; and at its base
lies the old dispute between principle and casuistry. If politics and
statecraft rest ultimate