Then there is a third class of things on which the best civilisation does permit privacy, does resent all inquiry or explanation.  This is in the case of things which need not be explained, because they cannot be explained, things too airy, instinctive, or intangible—­caprices, sudden impulses, and the more innocent kind of prejudice.  A man must not be asked why he is talkative or silent, for the simple reason that he does not know.  A man is not asked (even in Germany) why he walks slow or quick, simply because he could not answer.  A man must take his own road through a wood, and make his own use of a holiday.  And the reason is this:  not because he has a strong reason, but actually because he has a weak reason; because he has a slight and fleeting feeling about the matter which he could not explain to a policeman, which perhaps the very appearance of a policeman out of the bushes might destroy.  He must act on the impulse, because the impulse is unimportant, and he may never have the same impulse again.  If you like to put it so he must act on the impulse because the impulse is not worth a moment’s thought.  All these fancies men feel should be private; and even Fabians have never proposed to interfere with them.

Now, for the last fortnight the newspapers have been full of very varied comments upon the problem of the secrecy of certain parts of our political finance, and especially of the problem of the party funds.  Some papers have failed entirely to understand what the quarrel is about.  They have urged that Irish members and Labour members are also under the shadow, or, as some have said, even more under it.  The ground of this frantic statement seems, when patiently considered, to be simply this:  that Irish and Labour members receive money for what they do.  All persons, as far as I know, on this earth receive money for what they do; the only difference is that some people, like the Irish members, do it.

I cannot imagine that any human being could think any other human being capable of maintaining the proposition that men ought not to receive money.  The simple point is that, as we know that some money is given rightly and some wrongly, an elementary common-sense leads us to look with indifference at the money that is given in the middle of Ludgate Circus, and to look with particular suspicion at the money which a man will not give unless he is shut up in a box or a bathing-machine.  In short, it is too silly to suppose that anybody could ever have discussed the desirability of funds.  The only thing that even idiots could ever have discussed is the concealment of funds.  Therefore, the whole question that we have to consider is whether the concealment of political money-transactions, the purchase of peerages, the payment of election expenses, is a kind of concealment that falls under any of the three classes I have mentioned as those in which human custom and instinct does permit us to conceal.  I have suggested three kinds of secrecy which are human and defensible.  Can this institution be defended by means of any of them?