“Is this really the way in which ordinary human beings are treated by the police?  This is a hideous state of affairs in which bullies in uniform are allowed to address foul insults to whom they please.  Thank heaven, it has happened to someone like me.  Now, I can tell the Home Secretary, and he will put an end to the whole system.”

One never knows what a modern Home Secretary might do, but I doubt if one could be found who would reply to the marchioness:  “Well, he did you no harm.  You know, to me it all seems rather funny.”  And yet most things have their funny side if you look on them in the right spirit.  It would have been a funny thing if the hangman had executed the wrong prisoner instead of Crippen.  The hanged man would not have seen the joke, but impartial onlookers would have seen it, and Crippen would have seen it.  Similarly, if a drunken man threw a brick at his wife and hit the missionary by mistake, who could help laughing?  Even the wife, if she had a sense of humour, would have to join in.  Over-sensitive souls, such as Shelley was might view the incident with pain and mourn over a world in which human beings treated each other in such a way.  But life is a hard school, and it is not well to be over-sensitive.  After all, if we all became angels, there would be no jokes left.  We should have no clowns in the music-halls—­no comic boxing-turns with glorious thumpings on unexpecting noses.  Heaven is a place without laughter because there is no cruelty in it—­no insults and no accidents.  As for us, we are children of earth, and may as well enjoy the advantages of our position.  So let us laugh, “Ha, ha!”—­let us laugh, “Ho, ho!”

     The world is so full of a number of things,
     I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.

And never was it so full of a number of things as since a Coalition Government came into power—­queer, delightful things, for instance, like policemen who call judges “bastard,” as who should say:  “Cheerio, old thing!” Our grandfathers would not have seen that joke.  That is one of the things that convince me of the reality of progress.

XXV

GOING TO THE DERBY

“Do they have as much fun at the Derby as they used to?” I heard an old gentleman in a white hat, canary gloves, and buttoned boots asking a fellow-passenger in a London train.  Fun?  No; one would hardly call it that.  Looking back on it after forty years one will no doubt call it fun.  But it is certainly not fun while it lasts.

The two most important features of the Derby are getting there and getting away again.  Getting there is harder work than bricklaying or journalism.  You may ride in a motor-car, but your motor will be as useless to you as a submarine in a swimming bath.  From Sutton to Epsom and from Epsom to the Downs a long procession of motor-cars, buses, waggonettes, greengrocers’ carts, lorries, school carts, drays, and human beings stretches like a serpent of infinite length—­a serpent that is apparently too sick to move.  One thinks of it as an old serpent that has made itself very ill by swallowing machinery.