The modern notion of impressing the public by a mere demonstration of unpopularity, by being thrown out of meetings or thrown into jail is largely a mistake.  It rests on a fallacy touching the true popular value of martyrdom.  People look at human history and see that it has often happened that persecutions have not only advertised but even advanced a persecuted creed, and given to its validity the public and dreadful witness of dying men.  The paradox was pictorially expressed in Christian art, in which saints were shown brandishing as weapons the very tools that had slain them.  And because his martyrdom is thus a power to the martyr, modern people think that any one who makes himself slightly uncomfortable in public will immediately be uproariously popular.  This element of inadequate martyrdom is not true only of the Suffragettes; it is true of many movements I respect and some that I agree with.  It was true, for instance, of the Passive Resisters, who had pieces of their furniture sold up.  The assumption is that if you show your ordinary sincerity (or even your political ambition) by being a nuisance to yourself as well as to other people, you will have the strength of the great saints who passed through the fire.  Any one who can be hustled in a hall for five minutes, or put in a cell for five days, has achieved what was meant by martyrdom, and has a halo in the Christian art of the future.  Miss Pankhurst will be represented holding a policeman in each hand—­the instruments of her martyrdom.  The Passive Resister will be shown symbolically carrying the teapot that was torn from him by tyrannical auctioneers.

But there is a fallacy in this analogy of martyrdom.  The truth is that the special impressiveness which does come from being persecuted only happens in the case of extreme persecution.  For the fact that the modern enthusiast will undergo some inconvenience for the creed he holds only proves that he does hold it, which no one ever doubted.  No one doubts that the Nonconformist minister cares more for Nonconformity than he does for his teapot.  No one doubts that Miss Pankhurst wants a vote more than she wants a quiet afternoon and an armchair.  All our ordinary intellectual opinions are worth a bit of a row:  I remember during the Boer War fighting an Imperialist clerk outside the Queen’s Hall, and giving and receiving a bloody nose; but I did not think it one of the incidents that produce the psychological effect of the Roman amphitheatre or the stake at Smithfield.  For in that impression there is something more than the mere fact that a man is sincere enough to give his time or his comfort.  Pagans were not impressed by the torture of Christians merely because it showed that they honestly held their opinion; they knew that millions of people honestly held all sorts of opinions.  The point of such extreme martyrdom is much more subtle.  It is that it gives an appearance of a man having something quite specially strong to back him up, of