arm in that. There is no subtle spiritual evil in the fact
that people always brag about their vices; it is when they begin to brag
about their virtues that they become insufferable. But there is this to
be said, that illogicality in your constitution or your legal methods
may become very dangerous if there happens to be some great national
vice or national temptation which many take advantage of the chaos.
Similarly, a drunkard ought to have strict rules and hours; a temperate
man may obey his instincts.

Take some absurd anomaly in the British law--the fact, for instance,
that a man ceasing to be an M. P. has to become Steward of the Chiltern
Hundreds, an office which I believe was intended originally to keep down
some wild robbers near Chiltern, wherever that is. Obviously this kind
of illogicality does not matter very much, for the simple reason that
there is no great temptation to take advantage of it. Men retiring from
Parliament do not have any furious impulse to hunt robbers in the hills.
But if there were a real danger that wise, white-haired, venerable
politicians taking leave of public life would desire to do this (if,
for instance, there were any money in it), then clearly, if we went on
saying that the illogicality did not matter, when (as a matter of fact)
Sir Michael Hicks-Beach was hanging Chiltern shop-keepers every day and
taking their property, we should be very silly. The illogicality would
matter, for it would have become an excuse for indulgence. It is only
the very good who can live riotous lives.

Now this is exactly what is present in cases of police investigation
such as the one narrated above. There enters into such things a great
national sin, a far greater sin than drink--the habit of respecting a
gentleman. Snobbishness has, like drink, a kind of grand poetry. And
snobbishness has this peculiar and devilish quality of evil, that it is
rampant among very kindly people, with open hearts and houses. But it is
our great English vice; to be watched more fiercely than small-pox. If a
man wished to hear the worst and wickedest thing in England summed up in
casual English words, he would not find it in any foul oaths or ribald
quarrelling. He would find it in the fact that the best kind of working
man, when he wishes to praise any one, calls him "a gentleman." It never
occurs to him that he might as well call him "a marquis," or "a privy
councillor"--that he is simply naming a rank or class, not a