pool, and that was entirely
due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly
understood a triolet."

"Do you mean," asked Syme, "that there is really as much connection
between crime and the modern intellect as all that?"

"You are not sufficiently democratic," answered the policeman, "but you
were right when you said just now that our ordinary treatment of the
poor criminal was a pretty brutal business. I tell you I am sometimes
sick of my trade when I see how perpetually it means merely a war upon
the ignorant and the desperate. But this new movement of ours is a
very different affair. We deny the snobbish English assumption that the
uneducated are the dangerous criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors.
We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that
the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most
dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher.
Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my
heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they
merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the
property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect
it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy
the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or
they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic
formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage.
Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater
fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to
them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as
much as other people's."

Syme struck his hands together.

"How true that is," he cried. "I have felt it from my boyhood, but never
could state the verbal antithesis. The common criminal is a bad man, but
at least he is, as it were, a conditional good man. He says that if only
a certain obstacle be removed--say a wealthy uncle--he is then prepared
to accept the universe and to praise God. He is a reformer, but not an
anarchist. He wishes to cleanse the edifice, but not to destroy it. But
the evil philosopher is not trying to alter things, but to annihilate
them. Yes, the modern world has retained all those parts of police work
which are really oppressive and ignominious, the harrying of the poor,
the spying upon the unfortunate. It has