y at something in particular, and he was determined
to make that something in particular do. He had the rats, and he had the
gloves, and he had the Hindoo's--and he made them do, and before he knew
it (I doubt if he knows it now) he became a saviour or inventor.

In the big, desolate, darkened heart of a nation he had wedged in a God.

* * * * *

I wonder if General Booth-Tucker--that is, the original, very small
edition of General Booth-Tucker--had been in that memorable crowd, that
memorable day in the Strand when nobody (with a report that was heard
around the world) stole a penny--I wonder if General Booth-Tucker would
have been A Very Good Little Boy.

One of the pennies might have been missing.

I have no prejudice against the Very Good Little Boy. It is not his
goodness that is what is the matter with him. But I am very much afraid
that if there were any way of getting all the facts, it would not be
hard to prove categorically that what has been holding the world back
the last twenty-five years in its religious ideals, its business ethics,
its liberty, candour, its courage, and its skill in social engineering,
is the Very Good Little Boy. He may be comparatively harmless at first
and before his moustache is grown, but the moment he becomes a grown-up
or the moment he sits on committees with his quiet, careful, snug,
proper fear of experiment, of bold initiative, his disease of never
running a risk, his moral anaemia, he blocks all progress in churches, in
legislatures, in directors' meetings, in trades unions, in slums and
May-fairs. One sees The Good Little Boys weighing down everything the
moment they are grown up.

They have all been brought up each with his one faint, polite little
hunger, his one ambition, his one pale downy desire in life, looking
forward day by day, year by year, to the fine frenzy, to the fierce joy
of Never Making a Mistake.

If I had been given the appointment and were about to set to work
to-morrow morning to make a new world, I would begin by getting together
all the people in this one that I knew, or had noticed anywhere, who
seemed to have in them the spirit of experiment. Any boy or girl or man
or woman that I had seen having the curiosity to try the different kinds
and different sizes of right and wrong, or that I had seen boldly and
faithfully experimenting with the beautiful and the ugly so that they
really knew about them for themselves--wo