There was never a better play than pot luck; for it tells a tale with a point and a tale that might happen any day among English peasants.  There were never better actors than the local Buckinghamshire Players:  for they were acting their own life with just that rise into exaggeration which is the transition from life to art.  But all the time I was mesmerised by the moon; I saw all these men and women as enchanted things.  The poacher shot pheasants; the policeman tracked pheasants; the wife hid pheasants; they were all (especially the policeman) as true as death.  But there was something more true to death than true to life about it all:  the figures were frozen with a magic frost of sleep or fear or custom such as does not cramp the movements of the poor men of other lands.  I looked at the poacher and the policeman and the gun; then at the gun and the policeman and the poacher; and I could find no name for the fancy that haunted and escaped me.  The poacher believed in the Game Laws as much as the policeman.  The poacher’s wife not only believed in the Game Laws, but protected them as well as him.  She got a promise from her husband that he would never shoot another pheasant.  Whether he kept it I doubt; I fancy he sometimes shot a pheasant even after that.  But I am sure he never shot a policeman.  For we live in an enchanted land.

THE SUN WORSHIPPER

There is a shrewd warning to be given to all people who are in revolt.  And in the present state of things, I think all men are revolting in that sense; except a few who are revolting in the other sense.  But the warning to Socialists and other revolutionaries is this:  that as sure as fate, if they use any argument which is atheist or materialistic, that argument will always be turned against them at last by the tyrant and the slave.  To-day I saw one too common Socialist argument turned Tory, so to speak, in a manner quite startling and insane.  I mean that modern doctrine, taught, I believe, by most followers of Karl Marx, which is called the materialist theory of history.  The theory is, roughly, this:  that all the important things in history are rooted in an economic motive.  In short, history is a science; a science of the search for food.

Now I desire, in passing only, to point out that this is not merely untrue, but actually the reverse of the truth.  It is putting it too feebly to say that the history of man is not only economic.  Man would not have any history if he were only economic.  The need for food is certainly universal, so universal that it is not even human.  Cows have an economic motive, and apparently (I dare not say what ethereal delicacies may be in a cow) only an economic motive.  The cow eats grass anywhere and never eats anything else.  In short, the cow does fulfill the materialist theory of history:  that is why the cow has no history.  “A History of Cows” would