oubtful hearts of
human folk." It is better even to put the difficulty as the vulgar put
it than to be pertly unconscious of the difficulty altogether.

The same question might be considered well enough in the old proverb
that two is company and three is none. This proverb is the truth put
popularly: that is, it is the truth put wrong. Certainly it is untrue
that three is no company. Three is splendid company: three is the ideal
number for pure comradeship: as in the Three Musketeers. But if you
reject the proverb altogether; if you say that two and three are the
same sort of company; if you cannot see that there is a wider abyss
between two and three than between three and three million--then I
regret to inform you that you belong to the Third Class of human beings;
that you shall have no company either of two or three, but shall be
alone in a howling desert till you die.

The Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds

The other day on a stray spur of the Chiltern Hills I climbed up upon
one of those high, abrupt, windy churchyards from which the dead seem
to look down upon all the living. It was a mountain of ghosts as Olympus
was a mountain of gods. In that church lay the bones of great Puritan
lords, of a time when most of the power of England was Puritan, even of
the Established Church. And below these uplifted bones lay the huge
and hollow valleys of the English countryside, where the motors went by
every now and then like meteors, where stood out in white squares and
oblongs in the chequered forest many of the country seats even of
those same families now dulled with wealth or decayed with Toryism. And
looking over that deep green prospect on that luminous yellow evening, a
lovely and austere thought came into my mind, a thought as beautiful as
the green wood and as grave as the tombs. The thought was this: that
I should like to go into Parliament, quarrel with my party, accept the
Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds, and then refuse to give it up.

We are so proud in England of our crazy constitutional anomalies that
I fancy that very few readers indeed will need to be told about the
Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds. But in case there should be here or
there one happy man who has never heard of such twisted tomfooleries,
I will rapidly remind you what this legal fiction is. As it is quite a
voluntary, sometimes even an eager, affair to get into Parliament, you
would naturally suppose that it would be also a vol