more pleasure
in a minute than a Eugenist gets in a month. Stevenson had
lung-trouble; and it may, for all I know, have been perceptible to the
Eugenic eye even a generation before. But who would perform that
illegal operation: the stopping of Stevenson? Intercepting a letter
bursting with good news, confiscating a hamper full of presents and
prizes, pouring torrents of intoxicating wine into the sea, all this
is a faint approximation for the Eugenic inaction of the ancestors of
Stevenson. This, however, is not the essential point; with Stevenson
it is not merely a case of the pleasure we get, but of the pleasure he
got. If he had died without writing a line, he would have had more
red-hot joy than is given to most men. Shall I say of him, to whom I
owe so much, let the day perish wherein he was born? Shall I pray that
the stars of the twilight thereof be dark and it be not numbered among
the days of the year, because it shut not up the doors of his mother's
womb? I respectfully decline; like Job, I will put my hand upon my
mouth.

CHAPTER V

THE FLYING AUTHORITY

It happened one day that an atheist and a man were standing together
on a doorstep; and the atheist said, "It is raining." To which the man
replied, "What is raining?": which question was the beginning of a
violent quarrel and a lasting friendship. I will not touch upon any
heads of the dispute, which doubtless included Jupiter Pluvius, the
Neuter Gender, Pantheism, Noah's Ark, Mackintoshes, and the Passive
Mood; but I will record the one point upon which the two persons
emerged in some agreement. It was that there is such a thing as an
atheistic literary style; that materialism may appear in the mere
diction of a man, though he be speaking of clocks or cats or anything
quite remote from theology. The mark of the atheistic style is that it
instinctively chooses the word which suggests that things are dead
things; that things have no souls. Thus they will not speak of waging
war, which means willing it; they speak of the "outbreak of war," as
if all the guns blew up without the men touching them. Thus those
Socialists that are atheist will not call their international
sympathy, sympathy; they will call it "solidarity," as if the poor men
of France and Germany were physically stuck together like dates in a
grocer's shop. The same Marxian Socialists are accused of cursing the
Capitalists inordinately; but the truth is that they let the
Capitalists of