relished in England, where other political manners
obtain."

With all respect to this patriotic journalist, I am afraid the love of
hoaxing and practical joking cannot be limited to the Latin, or even
to the Continental races. It is a passion that is as universal as
lying, and a good deal older than drinking. It is merely the instinct
for lying, indeed, turned to comic account. Christianity, unable to
suppress it entirely, had to come to terms with it, and as a result we
have one day of the year, the first of April, devoted to the humours
of this popular sin. There are many explanations of the origin of All
Fools' Day, one of which is that it is a fragmentary memorial of the
mock trial of Jesus, and another of which refers it to the belief that
it was on the first of April that Noah sent out the dove from the Ark.
But the Christian or Hebrew origin of the festival appears to be
unlikely in view of the fact that the Hindus have an All Fools' Day of
their own, the Huli Festival, on almost exactly the same date. One may
take it that it was in origin simply a great natural holiday, on which
men enjoyed the license of lying as they enjoy the license of drinking
on a Bank Holiday. There is no other sport for which humanity would be
more likely to desire the occasional sanction of Church and State than
the sport of making fools of our neighbours. We must have fools if we
cannot have heroes. Some people, who are enthusiasts for destruction,
indeed, would give us fools and knaves in the place of our heroes, and
have even an idea that they would be serving some moral end in doing
so. It is on an iconoclastic eagerness of one kind or another that
nearly all hoaxing and practical joking is based. It consists chiefly
in taking somebody down a peg. The boy who used to shout "Wolf!",
however, may have been merely an excessively artistic youth who
enjoyed watching the varied expressions on the faces of the sweating
and disillusioned passersby who ran to his assistance. Obviously, a
man's face is a dozen times more interesting to look at when it is
crimson with frustrate virtue than when it is placid with thoughts of
the price of pigs.

This is not to justify the morality of hoaxing. It is to explain it as
an art for art's sake. Murder can, and has, been defended on the same
grounds. It is to be feared, however, that few hoaxers or murderers
can be named who pursued their hobby in the disinterested spirit of
artists. In most cases the