ivorce cases. One might put it a good deal
more strongly, indeed, for the private detective may in his own way be
an officer of truth and humanity, while the suspicious politician is
the prophet only of party disreputableness. He is like the average
suspicious husband, in the case of whom, even when his suspicions are
true, one is inclined to sympathise with the wife for being married to
so green-eyed a fool. Suspicion, take it all in all, is the most
tedious and scrannel of the sins.

It would be folly, of course, to suggest that there is no such thing
as justifiable suspicion. If you see a man in a Tube lift with his
hand on some old gentleman's watch-chain, you are justified in
suspecting that his object is something less innocent than to persuade
the old gentleman to become a Plymouth Brother. But the man of
suspicious temperament is not content with cases of this sort. He is
the sort of man who, if it were not for the law of libel, would
suspect the Rev. F. B. Meyer of having stolen La Gioconda from the
Louvre.

His suspicions are like those of a man who would accost you in the
street with the assertion that you had just murdered the President of
the United States or that you were hiding a stolen Dreadnought in your
pocket. Obviously there would be no reply to a man like this, except
that he was mad. He has got an idea into his head, and it is his idea,
and not the proof or disproof that the idea has any justification,
which seems to him to be the most important thing in the world.
Suspicion, indeed, is a well-known form of mania. Husbands suspect
their wives of trying to poison their beer; friends suspect friends of
planning the most extraordinary series of losses and humiliations for
them. Nothing can happen but the suspicious man believes that somebody
did it on purpose. He is like the savage who cannot believe that his
great-grandmother died without somebody having plotted it. Obviously,
to believe things like this is to put poison in the air, and it is not
surprising to learn that the savage goes out and murders the first man
he meets for being his great-grandmother's murderer. In this matter
civilised man is little better than the savage. He knows a little more
about natural laws, and so he is not suspicious of quite the same
things; but his suspicions, as soon as he begins to harbour them,
swiftly strip off his civilisation as a drunken man strips off his
coat in order to fight in the street. He becomes Ot