but there is a story in New York, illustrating this, which really does
in a sense attribute a burglary to a bishop. The story was that an
Anglican Lord Spiritual, of the pompous and now rather antiquated
school, was pushing open the door of a poor American tenement with all
the placid patronage of the squire and rector visiting the cottagers,
when a gigantic Irish policeman came round the corner and hit him a
crack over the head with a truncheon on the assumption that he was a
house-breaker. I hope that those who laugh at the story see that the
laugh is not altogether against the policeman; and that it is not only
the policeman, but rather the bishop, who had failed to recognise some
fine logical distinctions. The bishop, being a learned man, might well
be called upon (when he had sufficiently recovered from the knock on
the head) to define what is the exact difference between a house-breaker
and a home-visitor; and why the home-visitor should not be regarded as a
house-breaker when he will not behave as a guest. An impartial
intelligence will be much less shocked at the policeman's disrespect for
the home-visitor than by the home-visitor's disrespect for the home.

But that story smacks of the western soil, precisely because of the
element of brutality there is in it. In England snobbishness and social
oppression are much subtler and softer; the manifestations of them at
least are more mellow and humane. In comparison there is indeed
something which people call ruthless about the air of America,
especially the American cities. The bishop may push open the door
without an apology, but he would not break open the door with a
truncheon; but the Irish policeman's truncheon hits both ways. It may be
brutal to the tenement dweller as well as to the bishop; but the
difference and distinction is that it might really be brutal to the
bishop. It is because there is after all, at the back of all that
barbarism, a sort of a negative belief in the brotherhood of men, a dark
democratic sense that men are really men and nothing more, that the
coarse and even corrupt bureaucracy is not resented exactly as
oligarchic bureaucracies are resented. There is a sense in which
corruption is not so narrow as nepotism. It is upon this queer cynical
charity, and even humility, that it has been possible to rear so high
and uphold so long that tower of brass, Tammany Hall. The modern police
system is in spirit the most inhuman in history, and its