force?' Against this I
should write, 'I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour
and not the beginning.' The inquisitor, in his more than morbid
curiosity, had then written down, 'Are you a polygamist?' The answer to
this is, 'No such luck' or 'Not such a fool,' according to our
experience of the other sex. But perhaps a better answer would be that
given to W. T. Stead when he circulated the rhetorical question, 'Shall
I slay my brother Boer?'--the answer that ran, 'Never interfere in
family matters.' But among many things that amused me almost to the
point of treating the form thus disrespectfully, the most amusing was
the thought of the ruthless outlaw who should feel compelled to treat it
respectfully. I like to think of the foreign desperado, seeking to slip
into America with official papers under official protection, and sitting
down to write with a beautiful gravity, 'I am an anarchist. I hate you
all and wish to destroy you.' Or, 'I intend to subvert by force the
government of the United States as soon as possible, sticking the long
sheath-knife in my left trouser-pocket into Mr. Harding at the earliest
opportunity.' Or again, 'Yes, I am a polygamist all right, and my
forty-seven wives are accompanying me on the voyage disguised as
secretaries.' There seems to be a certain simplicity of mind about these
answers; and it is reassuring to know that anarchists and polygamists
are so pure and good that the police have only to ask them questions and
they are certain to tell no lies.

Now that is a model of the sort of foreign practice, founded on foreign
problems, at which a man's first impulse is naturally to laugh. Nor have
I any intention of apologising for my laughter. A man is perfectly
entitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it
incomprehensible. What he has no right to do is to laugh at it as
incomprehensible, and then criticise it as if he comprehended it. The
very fact of its unfamiliarity and mystery ought to set him thinking
about the deeper causes that make people so different from himself, and
that without merely assuming that they must be inferior to himself.

Superficially this is rather a queer business. It would be easy enough
to suggest that in this America has introduced a quite abnormal spirit
of inquisition; an interference with liberty unknown among all the
ancient despotisms and aristocracies. About that there will be something
to be said later; but superficially it i