Now here is an actual instance, a small case of how our social conscience really works:  tame in spirit, wild in result, blank in realisation; a thing without the light of mind in it.  I take this paragraph from a daily paper:—­“At Epping, yesterday, Thomas Woolbourne, a Lambourne labourer, and his wife were summoned for neglecting their five children.  Dr. Alpin said he was invited by the inspector of the N.S.P.C.C. to visit defendants’ cottage.  Both the cottage and the children were dirty.  The children looked exceedingly well in health, but the conditions would be serious in case of illness.  Defendants were stated to be sober.  The man was discharged.  The woman, who said she was hampered by the cottage having no water supply and that she was ill, was sentenced to six weeks’ imprisonment.  The sentence caused surprise, and the woman was removed crying, ‘Lord save me!’”

I know no name for this but Chinese.  It calls up the mental picture of some archaic and changeless Eastern Court, in which men with dried faces and stiff ceremonial costumes perform some atrocious cruelty to the accompaniment of formal proverbs and sentences of which the very meaning has been forgotten.  In both cases the only thing in the whole farrago that can be called real is the wrong.  If we apply the lightest touch of reason to the whole Epping prosecution it dissolves into nothing.

I here challenge any person in his five wits to tell me what that woman was sent to prison for.  Either it was for being poor, or it was for being ill.  Nobody could suggest, nobody will suggest, nobody, as a matter of fact, did suggest, that she had committed any other crime.  The doctor was called in by a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.  Was this woman guilty of cruelty to children?  Not in the least.  Did the doctor say she was guilty of cruelty to children?  Not in the least.  Was these any evidence even remotely bearing on the sin of cruelty?  Not a rap.  The worse that the doctor could work himself up to saying was that though the children were “exceedingly” well, the conditions would be serious in case of illness.  If the doctor will tell me any conditions that would be comic in case of illness, I shall attach more weight to his argument.

Now this is the worst effect of modern worry.  The mad doctor has gone mad.  He is literally and practically mad; and still he is quite literally and practically a doctor.  The only question is the old one, Quis docebit ipsum doctorem?  Now cruelty to children is an utterly unnatural thing; instinctively accursed of earth and heaven.  But neglect of children is a natural thing; like neglect of any other duty, it is a mere difference of degree that divides extending arms and legs in calisthenics and extending them on the rack.  It is a mere difference of degree that separates any operation from any torture.  The thumb-screw can easily be called Manicure.  Being pulled about by wild horses can easily be called Massage.  The modern problem is not so much what people will endure as what they will not endure.  But I fear I interrupt....  The boiling oil is boiling; and the Tenth Mandarin is already reciting the “Seventeen Serious Principles and the Fifty-three Virtues of the Sacred Emperor.”