evil belongs
to an age and not to a nation. But some American police methods are evil
past all parallel; and the detective can be more crooked than a hundred
crooks. But in the States it is not only possible that the policeman is
worse than the convict, it is by no means certain that he thinks that he
is any better. In the popular stories of O. Henry there are light
allusions to tramps being kicked out of hotels which will make any
Christian seek relief in strong language and a trust in heaven--not to
say in hell. And yet books even more popular than O. Henry's are those
of the 'sob-sisterhood' who swim in lachrymose lakes after love-lorn
spinsters, who pass their lives in reclaiming and consoling such tramps.
There are in this people two strains of brutality and sentimentalism
which I do not understand, especially where they mingle; but I am fairly
sure they both work back to the dim democratic origin. The Irish
policeman does not confine himself fastidiously to bludgeoning bishops;
his truncheon finds plenty of poor people's heads to hit; and yet I
believe on my soul he has a sort of sympathy with poor people not to be
found in the police of more aristocratic states. I believe he also reads
and weeps over the stories of the spinsters and the reclaimed tramps; in
fact, there is much of such pathos in an American magazine (my sole
companion on many happy railway journeys) which is not only devoted to
detective stories, but apparently edited by detectives. In these stories
also there is the honest, popular astonishment at the Upper Ten
expressed by the astronomical detective, if indeed he was a detective
and not a demon from the dark Red-Indian forests that faded to the
horizon behind him. But I have set him as the head and text of this
chapter because with these elements of the Third Degree of devilry and
the Seventh Heaven of sentimentalism I touch on elements that I do not
understand; and when I do not understand, I say so.

_The Republican in the Ruins_

The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone; especially to
a wood-cut or a lithographic stone. Modern people put their trust in
pictures, especially scientific pictures, as much as the most
superstitious ever put it in religious pictures. They publish a portrait
of the Missing Link as if he were the Missing Man, for whom the police
are always advertising; for all the world as if the anthropoid had been
photographed before he absconded. The scie