of that blind and bigoted honesty
which cannot see farther than its nose. I know a town where the
lamplighter twenty years ago was an honest old man of the blind and
bigoted type. It was his duty to go out and light the lamps of the
little town on every night when there was no moon. One month, however,
it was noticed that all the lamps were alight while the moon was
blazing, and that when the moon was dark the lamps were dark too. The
old man was called before the town committee to account for his
disobedience to orders. Instead of apologising, however, he firmly
insisted that he had done his duty, and produced a calendar to prove
that there was no moon on the nights on which everybody had seen it
shining, and that it might have reasonably been expected to shine on
the nights on which it was obscured. He was asked why he did not trust
his eyes, but he said that he always went by the calendar, and he
would not yield an inch of his position till someone took the calendar
from him and noticed that it was not even a current one, but a
calendar of the previous year. There, I think, is a dramatisation of a
very common form of honesty. It is as common among Cabinet Ministers
and Churchmen as among aged lamplighters. It expresses itself in
adherence not only to antiquated Mother Seigel calendars but to
constitutions and confessions of faith that have lost their meaning.
Whether this can justly be called honesty at all is a question with
something to be said on both sides. It is certainly stupidity of the
very best quality.

One of the reasons why one rather disbelieves in reverencing stupidity
is that it is not always as honest as it looks. It is often an armour
instinctively, if not deliberately, put on by comfortable people.
This kind of stupidity has sometimes been attributed to excessive
eating and drinking, as when Holinshed wrote of the sixteenth-century
Scots that "they far exceed us in overmuch and distemperate
gormandise, and so engross their bodies that diverse of them do oft
become unapt to any other purpose than to spend their times in large
tabling and belly cheer." But I have known gluttons who have yet had
all their wits about them and ladies who could hardly get through the
wing of a chicken and were nevertheless as stupid as a prize cat
blinking beside the fire. There is more in it than the stomach.
Stupidity of the kind I mean is really an ingeniously built castle
with moat and drawbridge to guard against the