All this is very consoling from the alien’s point of view.  He perceives, with great comfort, that out of strain is bred impatience in the shape of a young bundle of nerves, who is about as undisciplined an imp as the earth can show.  Out of impatience, grown up, habituated to violent and ugly talk, and the impatience and recklessness of his neighbours, is begotten lawlessness, encouraged by laziness and suppressed by violence when it becomes insupportable.  Out of lawlessness is bred rebellion (and that fruit has been tasted once already), and out of rebellion comes profit to those who wait.  He hears of the power of the People who, through rank slovenliness, neglect to see that their laws are soberly enforced from the beginning; and these People, not once or twice in a year, but many times within a month, go out in the open streets and, with a maximum waste of power and shouting, strangle other people with ropes.  They are, he is told, law-abiding citizens who have executed ’the will of the people’; which is as though a man should leave his papers unsorted for a year and then smash his desk with an axe, crying, ’Am I not orderly?’ He hears lawyers, otherwise sane and matured, defend this pig-jobbing murder on the grounds that ’the People stand behind the Law’—­the law that they never administered.  He sees a right, at present only half—­but still half—­conceded to anticipate the law in one’s own interests; and nervous impatience (always nerves) forejudging the suspect in gaol, the prisoner in the dock, and the award between nation and nation ere it is declared.  He knows that the maxim in London, Yokohama, and Hongkong in doing business with the pure-bred American is to keep him waiting, for the reason that forced inaction frets the man to a lather, as standing in harness frets a half-broken horse.  He comes across a thousand little peculiarities of speech, manner, and thought—­matters of nerve and stomach developed by everlasting friction—­and they are all just the least little bit in the world lawless.  No more so than the restless clicking together of horns in a herd of restless cattle, but certainly no less.  They are all good—­good for those who wait.

On the other hand, to consider the matter more humanly, there are thousands of delightful men and women going to pieces for the pitiful reason that if they do not keep up with the procession, ‘they are left.’  And they are left—­in clothes that have no back to them, among mounds of smilax.  And young men—­chance-met in the streets, talk to you about their nerves which are things no young man should know anything about; and the friends of your friends go down with nervous prostration, and the people overheard in the trains talk about their nerves and the nerves of their relatives; and the little children must needs have their nerves attended to ere their milk-teeth are shed, and the middle-aged women and the middle-aged men have got them too, and the old men lose the dignity of their age in an indecent restlessness, and the