phrase
for a good man. And this perennial temptation to a shameful admiration,
must, and, I think, does, constantly come in and distort and poison our
police methods.

In this case we must be logical and exact; for we have to keep watch
upon ourselves. The power of wealth, and that power at its vilest, is
increasing in the modern world. A very good and just people, without
this temptation, might not need, perhaps, to make clear rules and
systems to guard themselves against the power of our great financiers.
But that is because a very just people would have shot them long ago,
from mere native good feeling.

XXVIII. The Lion

In the town of Belfort I take a chair and I sit down in the street. We
talk in a cant phrase of the Man in the Street, but the Frenchman is the
man in the street. Things quite central for him are connected with these
lamp-posts and pavements; everything from his meals to his martyrdoms.
When first an Englishman looks at a French town or village his first
feeling is simply that it is uglier than an English town or village;
when he looks again he sees that this comparative absence of the
picturesque is chiefly expressed in the plain, precipitous frontage
of the houses standing up hard and flat out of the street like the
cardboard houses in a pantomime--a hard angularity allied perhaps to
the harshness of French logic. When he looks a third time he sees quite
simply that it is all because the houses have no front gardens. The
vague English spirit loves to have the entrance to its house softened by
bushes and broken by steps. It likes to have a little anteroom of hedges
half in the house and half out of it; a green room in a double sense.
The Frenchman desires no such little pathetic ramparts or halting
places, for the street itself is a thing natural and familiar to him.

.....

The French have no front gardens; but the street is every man's front
garden. There are trees in the street, and sometimes fountains. The
street is the Frenchman's tavern, for he drinks in the street. It is his
dining-room, for he dines in the street. It is his British Museum, for
the statues and monuments in French streets are not, as with us, of the
worst, but of the best, art of the country, and they are often actually
as historical as the Pyramids. The street again is the Frenchman's
Parliament, for France has never taken its Chamber of Deputies so
seriously as we take our House of Commons, and the quibbles of m