else might.  There are people among my esteemed correspondents who might believe anything.  It is enough for me to say here that in this small respect Japs affect me like cats.  I mean that I love them.  I love their quaint and native poetry, their instinct of easy civilisation, their unique unreplaceable art, the testimony they bear to the bustling, irrepressible activities of nature and man.  If I were a real mystic looking down on them from a real mountain, I am sure I should love them more even than the strong winged and unwearied birds or the fruitful, ever multiplying fish.  But, as for liking them, as one likes a dog—­that is quite another matter.  That would mean trusting them.

In the old English and Scotch ballads the fairies are regarded very much in the way that I feel inclined to regard Japs and cats.  They are not specially spoken of as evil; they are enjoyed as witching and wonderful; but they are not trusted as good.  You do not say the wrong words or give the wrong gifts to them; and there is a curious silence about what would happen to you if you did.  Now to me, Japan, the Japan of Art, was always a fairyland.  What trees as gay as flowers and peaks as white as wedding cakes; what lanterns as large as houses and houses as frail as lanterns! but... but... the missionary explained (I read in the paper) that the assertion and denial about the Japanese use of torture was a mere matter of verbal translation.  “The Japanese would not call twisting the thumbs back ‘torture.’”

THE CHARTERED LIBERTINE

I find myself in agreement with Mr. Robert Lynd for his most just remark in connection with the Malatesta case, that the police are becoming a peril to society.  I have no attraction to that sort of atheist asceticism to which the purer types of Anarchism tend; but both an atheist and an ascetic are better men than a spy; and it is ignominious to see one’s country thus losing her special point of honour about asylum and liberty.  It will be quite a new departure if we begin to protect and whitewash foreign policemen.  I always understood it was only English policemen who were absolutely spotless.  A good many of us, however, have begun to feel with Mr. Lynd, and on all sides authorities and officials are being questioned.  But there is one most graphic and extraordinary fact, which it did not lie in Mr. Lynd’s way to touch upon, but which somebody really must seize and emphasise.  It is this:  that at the very time when we are all beginning to doubt these authorities, we are letting laws pass to increase their most capricious powers.  All our commissions, petitions, and letters to the papers are asking whether these authorities can give an account of their stewardship.  And at the same moment all our laws are decreeing that they shall not give any account of their stewardship, but shall become yet more irresponsible stewards.  Bills like the Feeble-Minded Bill and the Inebriate Bill