Nothing could have been easier for me (if I were some one else) than to perform my task in that God-rest-you-merry-gentlemen-may-nothing-you-dismay spirit which so grossly flatters the sensibilities of the average citizen by its assumption that he is sharp enough to be dismayed by what stares him in the face.  Charles Dickens had lucid intervals in which he was vaguely conscious of the abuses around him; but his spasmodic efforts to expose these brought him into contact with realities so agonising to his highstrung literary nerves that he invariably sank back into debauches of unsocial optimism.  Even the Swan of Avon had his glimpses of the havoc of displacement wrought by Elizabethan romanticism in the social machine which had been working with tolerable smoothness under the prosaic guidance of Henry 8.  The time was out of joint; and the Swan, recognising that he was the last person to ever set it right, consoled himself by offering the world a soothing doctrine of despair.  Not for me, thank you, that Swansdown pillow.  I refuse as flatly to fuddle myself in the shop of “W.  Shakespeare, Druggist,” as to stimulate myself with the juicy joints of “C.  Dickens, Family Butcher.”  Of these and suchlike pernicious establishments my patronage consists in weaving round the shop-door a barbed-wire entanglement of dialectic and then training my moral machine-guns on the customers.

In this devilish function I have, as you know, acquired by practice a tremendous technical skill; and but for the more or less innocent pride I take in showing off my accomplishment to all and sundry, I doubt whether even my iron nerves would be proof against the horrors that have impelled me to thus perfect myself.  In my nonage I believed humanity could be reformed if only it were intelligently preached at for a sufficiently long period.  This first fine careless rapture I could no more recapture, at my age, than I could recapture hoopingcough or nettlerash.  One by one, I have flung all political nostra overboard, till there remain only dynamite and scientific breeding.  My touching faith in these saves me from pessimism:  I believe in the future; but this only makes the present—­which I foresee as going strong for a couple of million of years or so—­all the more excruciating by contrast.

For casting into dramatic form a compendium of my indictments of the present from a purely political standpoint, the old play of Snt George occurred to me as having exactly the framework I needed.  In the person of the Turkish Knight I could embody that howling chaos which does duty among us for a body-politic.  The English Knight would accordingly be the Liberal Party, whose efforts (whenever it is in favor with the electorate) to reduce chaos to order by emulating in foreign politics the blackguardism of a Metternich or Bismarck, and in home politics the spirited attitudinisings of a Garibaldi or Cavor, are foredoomed to the failure which its inherent oldmaidishness must always win for