is really vegetarian let its government force upon it the whole horrible weight of vegetarianism.  Let its government give the national guests a State vegetarian banquet.  Let its government, in the most literal and awful sense of the words, give them beans.  That sort of tyranny is all very well; for it is the people tyrannising over all the persons.  But “temperance reformers” are like a small group of vegetarians who should silently and systematically act on an ethical assumption entirely unfamiliar to the mass of the people.  They would always be giving peerages to greengrocers.  They would always be appointing Parliamentary Commissions to enquire into the private life of butchers.  Whenever they found a man quite at their mercy, as a pauper or a convict or a lunatic, they would force him to add the final touch to his inhuman isolation by becoming a vegetarian.  All the meals for school children will be vegetarian meals.  All the State public houses will be vegetarian public houses.  There is a very strong case for vegetarianism as compared with teetotalism.  Drinking one glass of beer cannot by any philosophy be drunkenness; but killing one animal can, by this philosophy, be murder.  The objection to both processes is not that the two creeds, teetotal and vegetarian, are not admissible; it is simply that they are not admitted.  The thing is religious persecution because it is not based on the existing religion of the democracy.  These people ask the poor to accept in practice what they know perfectly well that the poor would not accept in theory.  That is the very definition of religious persecution.  I was against the Tory attempt to force upon ordinary Englishmen a Catholic theology in which they do not believe.  I am even more against the attempt to force upon them a Mohamedan morality which they actively deny.

Again, in the case of anonymous journalism I seem to have said a great deal without getting out the point very clearly.  Anonymous journalism is dangerous, and is poisonous in our existing life simply because it is so rapidly becoming an anonymous life.  That is the horrible thing about our contemporary atmosphere.  Society is becoming a secret society.  The modern tyrant is evil because of his elusiveness.  He is more nameless than his slave.  He is not more of a bully than the tyrants of the past; but he is more of a coward.  The rich publisher may treat the poor poet better or worse than the old master workman treated the old apprentice.  But the apprentice ran away and the master ran after him.  Nowadays it is the poet who pursues and tries in vain to fix the fact of responsibility.  It is the publisher who runs away.  The clerk of Mr. Solomon gets the sack:  the beautiful Greek slave of the Sultan Suliman also gets the sack; or the sack gets her.  But though she is concealed under the black waves of the Bosphorus, at least her destroyer is not concealed.  He goes behind golden trumpets riding on a white elephant.  But in the case of the clerk it is almost as difficult