into a frog might begin to behave like a flamingo.  For the purpose even of the wildest romance, results must be real; results must be irrevocable.  Christian marriage is the great example of a real and irrevocable result; and that is why it is the chief subject and centre of all our romantic writing.  And this is my last instance of the things that I should ask, and ask imperatively, of any social paradise; I should ask to be kept to my bargain, to have my oaths and engagements taken seriously; I should ask Utopia to avenge my honour on myself.

All my modern Utopian friends look at each other rather doubtfully, for their ultimate hope is the dissolution of all special ties.  But again I seem to hear, like a kind of echo, an answer from beyond the world.  “You will have real obligations, and therefore real adventures when you get to my Utopia.  But the hardest obligation and the steepest adventure is to get there.”

CHAPTER VIII.—­The Romance of Orthodoxy

It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch.  But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle.  Take one quite external case; the streets are noisy with taxicabs and motor-cars; but this is not due to human activity but to human repose.  There would be less bustle if there were more activity, if people were simply walking about.  Our world would be more silent if it were more strenuous.  And this which is true of the apparent physical bustle is true also of the apparent bustle of the intellect.  Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought.  Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable.  Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains.  We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves.  It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable.  If you say “The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognised by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,” you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the grey matter inside your skull.  But if you begin “I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,” you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think.  The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard.  There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word “damn” than in the word “degeneration.”