There is, however, another good work that is done by detective stories.  While it is the constant tendency of the Old Adam to rebel against so universal and automatic a thing as civilization, to preach departure and rebellion, the romance of police activity keeps in some sense before the mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions.  By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but the traitors within our gates.  When the detective in a police romance stands alone, and somewhat fatuously fearless amid the knives and fists of a thieves’ kitchen, it does certainly serve to make us remember that it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure, while the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves.  The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man.  It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies.  It reminds us that the whole noiseless and unnoticeable police management by which we are ruled and protected is only a successful knight-errantry.

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A DEFENCE OF PATRIOTISM

The decay of patriotism in England during the last year or two is a serious and distressing matter.  Only in consequence of such a decay could the current lust of territory be confounded with the ancient love of country.  We may imagine that if there were no such thing as a pair of lovers left in the world, all the vocabulary of love might without rebuke be transferred to the lowest and most automatic desire.  If no type of chivalrous and purifying passion remained, there would be no one left to say that lust bore none of the marks of love, that lust was rapacious and love pitiful, that lust was blind and love vigilant, that lust sated itself and love was insatiable.  So it is with the ’love of the city,’ that high and ancient intellectual passion which has been written in red blood on the same table with the primal passions of our being.  On all sides we hear to-day of the love of our country, and yet anyone who has literally such a love must be bewildered at the talk, like a man hearing all men say that the moon shines by day and the sun by night.  The conviction must come to him at last that these men do not realize what the word ‘love’ means, that they mean by the love of country, not what a mystic might mean by the love of God, but something of what a child might mean by the love of jam.  To one who loves his fatherland, for instance, our boasted indifference to the ethics of a national war is mere mysterious gibberism.  It is like telling a man that a boy has committed murder, but that he