hat has in it the quality of _nonsense_. It could only
happen in a nightmare; not in a clear and rational hell. It is the top
point of that anarchy in the governing mind which, as I said at the
beginning, is the main trait of modernity, especially in England. But
if the first note in our policy is madness, the next note is certainly
meanness. There are two peculiarly mean and unmanly legal mantraps in
which this wretched man is tripped up. The first is that which
prevents him from doing what any ordinary savage or nomad would
do--take his chance of an uneven subsistence on the rude bounty of
nature.

There is something very abject about forbidding this; because it is
precisely this adventurous and vagabond spirit which the educated
classes praise most in their books, poems and speeches. To feel the
drag of the roads, to hunt in nameless hills and fish in secret
streams, to have no address save "Over the Hills and Far Away," to be
ready to breakfast on berries and the daybreak and sup on the sunset
and a sodden crust, to feed on wild things and be a boy again, all
this is the heartiest and sincerest impulse in recent culture, in the
songs and tales of Stevenson, in the cult of George Borrow and in the
delightful little books published by Mr. E.V. Lucas. It is the one
true excuse in the core of Imperialism; and it faintly softens the
squalid prose and wooden-headed wickedness of the Self-Made Man who
"came up to London with twopence in his pocket." But when a poorer but
braver man with less than twopence in his pocket does the very thing
we are always praising, makes the blue heavens his house, we send him
to a house built for infamy and flogging. We take poverty itself and
only permit it with a property qualification; we only allow a man to
be poor if he is rich. And we do this most savagely if he has sought
to snatch his life by that particular thing of which our boyish
adventure stories are fullest--hunting and fishing. The extremely
severe English game laws hit most heavily what the highly reckless
English romances praise most irresponsibly. All our literature is full
of praise of the chase--especially of the wild goose chase. But if a
poor man followed, as Tennyson says, "far as the wild swan wings to
where the world dips down to sea and sands," Tennyson would scarcely
allow him to catch it. If he found the wildest goose in the wildest
fenland in the wildest regions of the sunset, he would very probably
discover tha