man; and the devastating bore of being photographed when you want to write poetry made him look like a lazy man.  Holding his head back, as people do when they are being photographed (or shot), but as he certainly never held it normally, accidentally concealed the bald dome that dominated his slight figure.  Here we have a clockwork picture, begun and finished by a button and a box of chemicals, from which every projecting feature has been more delicately and dexterously omitted than they could have been by the most namby-pamby flatterer, painting in the weakest water-colours, on the smoothest ivory.

I happen to possess a book of Mr. Max Beerbohm’s caricatures, one of which depicts the unfortunate poet in question.  To say it represents an utterly incredible hobgoblin is to express in faint and inadequate language the license of its sprawling lines.  The authorities thought it strictly safe and scientific to circulate the poet’s photograph.  They would have clapped me in an asylum if I had asked them to circulate Max’s caricature.  But the caricature would have been far more likely to find the man.

This is a small but exact symbol of the failure of scientific civilisation.  It is so satisfied in knowing it has a photograph of a man that it never asks whether it has a likeness of him.  Thus declarations, seemingly most detailed, have flashed along the wires of the world ever since I was a boy.  We were told that in some row Boer policemen had shot an Englishman, a British subject, an English citizen.  A long time afterwards we were quite casually informed that the English citizen was quite black.  Well, it makes no difference to the moral question; black men should be shot on the same ethical principles as white men.  But it makes one distrust scientific communications which permitted so startling an alteration of the photograph.  I am sorry we got hold of a photographic negative in which a black man came out white.  Later we were told that an Englishman had fought for the Boers against his own flag, which would have been a disgusting thing to do.  Later, it was admitted that he was an Irishman; which is exactly as different as if he had been a Pole.  Common sense, with all the facts before it, does see that black is not white, and that a nation that has never submitted has a right to moral independence.  But why does it so seldom have all the facts before it?  Why are the big aggressive features, such as blackness or the Celtic wrath, always left out in such official communications, as they were left out in the photograph?  My friend the poet had hair as black as an African and eyes as fierce as an Irishman; why does our civilisation drop all four of the facts?  Its error is to omit the arresting thing—­which might really arrest the criminal.  It strikes first the chilling note of science, demanding a man “above the middle height, chin shaven, with gray moustache,” etc., which might mean Mr. Balfour or Sir Redvers Buller.  It does not seize the first fact of impression, as that a man is obviously a sailor or a Jew or a drunkard or a gentleman or a nigger or an albino or a prize-fighter or an imbecile or an American.  These are the realities by which the people really recognise each other.  They are almost always left out of the inquiry.