Mayor, be so awfully sorry to disturb him, find he had forgotten his card-case, mention, as if he were ashamed of it, that he was the Duke of Mercia, and carry the whole thing through with the air of a man who could get two hundred witnesses and two thousand retainers, but who was too tired to call any of them.  And if he did it very well I strongly suspect that he would be as successful as the indefensible Captain at Koepenick.

Our tendency for many centuries past has been, not so much towards creating an aristocracy (which may or may not be a good thing in itself), as towards substituting an aristocracy for everything else.  In England we have an aristocracy instead of a religion.  The nobility are to the English poor what the saints and the fairies are to the Irish poor, what the large devil with a black face was to the Scotch poor—­the poetry of life.  In the same way in England we have an aristocracy instead of a Government.  We rely on a certain good humour and education in the upper class to interpret to us our contradictory Constitution.  No educated man born of woman will be quite so absurd as the system that he has to administer.  In short, we do not get good laws to restrain bad people.  We get good people to restrain bad laws.  And last of all we in England have an aristocracy instead of an Army.  We have an Army of which the officers are proud of their families and ashamed of their uniforms.  If I were a king of any country whatever, and one of my officers were ashamed of my uniform, I should be ashamed of my officer.  Beware, then, of the really well-bred and apologetic gentleman whose clothes are at once quiet and fashionable, whose manner is at once diffident and frank.  Beware how you admit him into your domestic secrets, for he may be a bogus Earl.  Or, worse still, a real one.

THE BOY

I have no sympathy with international aggression when it is taken seriously, but I have a certain dark and wild sympathy with it when it is quite absurd.  Raids are all wrong as practical politics, but they are human and imaginable as practical jokes.  In fact, almost any act of ragging or violence can be forgiven on this strict condition—­that it is of no use at all to anybody.  If the aggressor gets anything out of it, then it is quite unpardonable.  It is damned by the least hint of utility or profit.  A man of spirit and breeding may brawl, but he does not steal.  A gentleman knocks off his friend’s hat; but he does not annex his friend’s hat.  For this reason (as Mr. Belloc has pointed out somewhere), the very militant French people have always returned after their immense raids—­the raids of Godfrey the Crusader, the raids of Napoleon; “they are sucked back, having accomplished nothing but an epic.”

Sometimes I see small fragments of information in the newspapers which make my heart leap with an irrational patriotic sympathy.  I have had the misfortune to be left comparatively cold by many of the enterprises and proclamations of my country in recent times.  But the other day I found in the Tribune the following paragraph, which I may be permitted to set down as an example of the kind of international outrage with which I have by far the most instinctive sympathy.  There is something attractive, too, in the austere simplicity with which the affair is set forth—­