s true that this degree of
officialism is comparatively unique. In a journey which I took only the
year before I had occasion to have my papers passed by governments which
many worthy people in the West would vaguely identify with corsairs and
assassins; I have stood on the other side of Jordan, in the land ruled
by a rude Arab chief, where the police looked so like brigands that one
wondered what the brigands looked like. But they did not ask me whether
I had come to subvert the power of the Shereef; and they did not exhibit
the faintest curiosity about my personal views on the ethical basis of
civil authority. These ministers of ancient Moslem despotism did not
care about whether I was an anarchist; and naturally would not have
minded if I had been a polygamist. The Arab chief was probably a
polygamist himself. These slaves of Asiatic autocracy were content, in
the old liberal fashion, to judge me by my actions; they did not inquire
into my thoughts. They held their power as limited to the limitation of
practice; they did not forbid me to hold a theory. It would be easy to
argue here that Western democracy persecutes where even Eastern
despotism tolerates or emancipates. It would be easy to develop the
fancy that, as compared with the sultans of Turkey or Egypt, the
American Constitution is a thing like the Spanish Inquisition.

Only the traveller who stops at that point is totally wrong; and the
traveller only too often does stop at that point. He has found something
to make him laugh, and he will not suffer it to make him think. And the
remedy is not to unsay what he has said, not even, so to speak, to
unlaugh what he has laughed, not to deny that there is something unique
and curious about this American inquisition into our abstract opinions,
but rather to continue the train of thought, and follow the admirable
advice of Mr. H. G. Wells, who said, 'It is not much good thinking of a
thing unless you think it out.' It is not to deny that American
officialism is rather peculiar on this point, but to inquire what it
really is which makes America peculiar, or which is peculiar to America.
In short, it is to get some ultimate idea of what America _is_; and the
answer to that question will reveal something much deeper and grander
and more worthy of our intelligent interest.

It may have seemed something less than a compliment to compare the
American Constitution to the Spanish Inquisition. But oddly enough, it
does invol