The
man who first thought lunatics should not be chained to walls or left
naked on unsavoury beds of straw was a crank. Galileo was an
intellectual crank of the shameless type. Shelley is the beautiful crank
of all times, champion of forlorn causes, the inspired rebel of the
spirit.

There are small and noisy and irritating cranks. I have met scores of
them. They are intense, but shortsighted. Some are delightfully
ingenuous, with the lovable simplicity of the child. Others are of a
morbid and carping disposition, with an inordinate sense of their own
importance.

I have for many years been the privileged though unworthy recipient of
confidences and schemes for the elimination of all manner of cruelty and
wickedness from the world. My office in Piccadilly has received within
its sympathetic walls a procession of born cranks, of souls charged with
high missions for the betterment of the world. Faddists, eccentrics,
dreamers, mystics, workers chained to lifelong slavery by their dominant
idea, have poured out their plans to me. Sometimes visitors came who
clearly had crossed the unguarded frontier between sanity and insanity,
interesting and pathetic and clever, yet of the great order of God's
fools. They were not unhappy, for their path was brilliantly lit by an
idea, whilst the rest of the world was plunged in darkness. They would
scold me and pity me because I refused to follow their light, but they
were never unkind.

There is an old blue easy-chair in the office, dilapidated and
springless, in which I have deposited my cranks. I always choose a hard,
uncomfortable seat opposite, from which I conduct my defence against the
insidious appeal of the visitors. Their faces do not fade from my
memory. They haunt me with a gentle refrain of the world-as-it-might-be.
The world as they would like it to be is certainly not always habitable,
but it is generally one of exuberant imaginative verdure.

Here is the man who wants to abolish sex. He believes in spirit. He is
timid and womanly, his mind is pure and inexpressibly shocked at the
carnal desires which disfigure the otherwise fair picture of humanity.
Love, marriage, procreation, cannot these be purged from the base and
degrading obsessions of sex? By abstinence, by concentration, we may
eliminate them. Surely the story of the Fall makes it quite clear that
we were never meant to perpetuate such gross mistakes.... Here is the
woman who believes sex to be the source of