you cherish as holiest is most probably wrong; and that in social
and moral matters especially (where men have been longest ruled by pure
superstitions) new and startling forms of thought have the highest _a
priori_ probability in their favour. Dismiss your idols. Give every
opinion its fair chance of success--especially when it seems to you both
wicked and ridiculous, recollecting that it is better to let five
hundred crude guesses run loose about the world unclad, than to crush
one fledgling truth in its callow condition. To the Greeks, foolishness:
to the Jews, a stumbling-block. If you can't be one of the prophets
yourself, you can at least abstain from helping to stone them.

Dear me! These reflections to-day are anything but post-prandial. The
_gnocchi_ and the olives must certainly have disagreed with me. But
perhaps it may some of it be "wrote sarcastic." I have heard tell there
is a thing called irony.

IX.

_THE ROMANCE OF THE CLASH OF RACES._

The world has expanded faster in the last thirty years than in any
previous age since "the spacious days of great Elizabeth." And with its
expansion, of course, our ideas have widened. I believe Europe is now in
the midst of just such an outburst of thought and invention as that
which followed the discovery of America, and of the new route to India
by the Cape of Good Hope. But I don't want to insist too strongly upon
that point, because I know a great many of my contemporaries are deeply
hurt by the base and spiteful suggestion that they and their fellows are
really quite as good as any fish that ever came out of the sea before
them. I only desire now to call attention for a moment to one curious
result entailed by this widening of the world upon our literary
productivity--a result which, though obvious enough when one comes to
look at it, seems to me hitherto to have strangely escaped deliberate
notice.

In one word, the point of which I speak is the comparative
cosmopolitanisation of letters, and especially the introduction into
literary art of the phenomena due to the Clash of Races.

This Clash itself is the one picturesque and novel feature of our
otherwise somewhat prosaic and machine-made epoch; and, therefore, it
has been eagerly seized upon, with one accord, by all the chief
purveyors of recent literature, and especially of fiction. They have
espied in it, with technical instinct, the best chance for obtaining
that fresh interest which is essen