(very appropriate names for them) actually arm with scorpions the hand that has chastised the Malatestas and Maleckas with whips.  The inspector, the doctor, the police sergeant, the well-paid person who writes certificates and “passes” this, that, or the other; this sort of man is being trusted with more authority, apparently because he is being doubted with more reason.  In one room we are asking why the Government and the great experts between them cannot sail a ship.  In another room we are deciding that the Government and experts shall be allowed, without trial or discussion, to immure any one’s body, damn any one’s soul, and dispose of unborn generations with the levity of a pagan god.  We are putting the official on the throne while he is still in the dock.

The mere meaning of words is now strangely forgotten and falsified; as when people talk of an author’s “message,” without thinking whom it is from; and I have noted in these connections the strange misuse of another word.  It is the excellent mediaeval word “charter.”  I remember the Act that sought to save gutter-boys from cigarettes was called “The Children’s Charter.”  Similarly the Act which seeks to lock up as lunatics people who are not lunatics was actually called a “charter” of the feeble-minded.  Now this terminology is insanely wrong, even if the Bills are right.  Even were they right in theory they would be applied only to the poor, like many better rules about education and cruelty.  A woman was lately punished for cruelty because her children were not washed when it was proved that she had no water.  From that it will be an easy step in Advanced Thought to punishing a man for wine-bibbing when it is proved that he had no wine.  Rifts in right reason widen down the ages.  And when we have begun by shutting up a confessedly kind person for cruelty, we may yet come to shutting up Mr. Tom Mann for feeblemindedness.

But even if such laws do good to children or idiots, it is wrong to use the word “charter.”  A charter does not mean a thing that does good to people.  It means a thing that grants people more rights and liberties.  It may be a good thing for gutter-boys to be deprived of their cigarettes:  it might be a good thing for aldermen to be deprived of their cigars.  But I think the Goldsmiths’ Company would be very much surprised if the King granted them a new charter (in place of their mediaeval charter), and it only meant that policemen might pull the cigars out of their mouths.  It may be a good thing that all drunkards should be locked up:  and many acute statesmen (King John, for instance) would certainly have thought it a good thing if all aristocrats could be locked up.  But even that somewhat cynical prince would scarcely have granted to the barons a thing called “the Great Charter” and then locked them all up on the strength of it.  If he had, this interpretation of the word “charter” would have struck the barons with considerable surprise.  I doubt if their narrow mediaeval minds could have taken it in.