ons that suspicion plays havoc.
International suspicion is a no less costly visitor. We live in a
world in which every cup of tea we drink and every pipe of tobacco we
smoke pays toll to this ancient and gluttonous dragon. Every year each
country sets up huge altars of men and ships and guns to the beast,
but he is not satisfied. He demands universal power, and insists that
we shall give all our goods to him except just enough to keep
ourselves alive and that we shall not shrink even from offering up
human sacrifices at a nod of his head. Perhaps some day a new St
George will arise and release us from so shameful a subjection. Common
sense seems to have as little force against him as an ordinary
foot-soldier against Goliath. We feel the need of some miraculous
personage to put an end to our distress. Meanwhile, one may hail as
prophetic the continual organisation of new knighthoods for the
Suppression of the Dragon.

II

ON GOOD RESOLUTIONS

There is too little respect paid to the good resolutions which are so
popular a feature of the New Year. We laugh at the man who is always
turning over a new leaf as though he were the last word in absurdity,
and we even invent proverbs to discourage him, such as that "the road
to Hell is paved with good intentions." This makes life extremely
difficult for the well-meaning. It robs many of us of the very last of
our little store of virtue. Our virtue we have hitherto put almost
entirely into our resolutions. To ask us to put it into our actions
instead is like asking a man who has for years devoted his genius to
literature to switch it off on to marine biology. Nature,
unfortunately, has not made us sufficiently accommodating for these
rapid changes. She has appointed to each of us his own small plot; has
made one of us a poet, another an economist, another a politician--one
of us good at making plans, another good at putting them into
execution. One feels justified, then, in claiming for the maker of
good resolutions a place in the sun. Good resolutions are too
delightful a form of morality to be allowed to disappear from a world
in which so much of morality is dismal. They are morality at its
dawn--morality fresh and untarnished and full of song. They are golden
anticipations of the day's work--anticipations of which, alas! the
day's work too often proves unworthy. Work, says Amiel somewhere, is
vulgarised thought. Work, I prefer to say, is vulgarised good
resolutions