But I will tell them one small secret in conclusion.  There is nothing whatever wrong in the ancient and universal idea of Punishment—­except that we are not punishing the right people.

THE DREGS OF PURITANISM

One peculiarity of the genuine kind of enemy of the people is that his slightest phrase is clamorous with all his sins.  Pride, vain-glory, and hypocrisy seem present in his very grammar; in his very verbs or adverbs or prepositions, as well as in what he says, which is generally bad enough.  Thus I see that a Nonconformist pastor in Bromley has been talking about the pathetic little presents of tobacco sent to the common soldiers.  This is how he talks about it.  He is reported as having said, “By the help of God, they wanted this cigarette business stopped.”  How one could write a volume on that sentence, a great thick volume called “The Decline of the English Middle Class.”  In taste, in style, in philosophy, in feeling, in political project, the horrors of it are as unfathomable as hell.

First, to begin with the trifle, note something slipshod and vague in the mere verbiage, typical of those who prefer a catchword to a creed.  “This cigarette business” might mean anything.  It might mean Messrs. Salmon and Gluckstein’s business.  But the pastor at Bromley will not interfere with that, for the indignation of his school of thought, even when it is sincere, always instinctively and unconsciously swerves aside from anything that is rich and powerful like the partners in a big business, and strikes instead something that is poor and nameless like the soldiers in a trench.  Nor does the expression make clear who “they” are—­whether the inhabitants of Britain or the inhabitants of Bromley, or the inhabitants of this one crazy tabernacle in Bromley; nor is it evident how it is going to be stopped or who is being asked to stop it.  All these things are trifles compared to the more terrible offences of the phrase; but they are not without their social and historical interest.  About the beginning of the nineteenth century the wealthy Puritan class, generally the class of the employers of labour, took a line of argument which was narrow, but not nonsensical.  They saw the relation of rich and poor quite coldly as a contract, but they saw that a contract holds both ways.  The Puritans of the middle class, in short, did in some sense start talking and thinking for themselves.  They are still talking.  They have long ago left off thinking.  They talk about the loyalty of workmen to their employers, and God knows what rubbish; and the first small certainty about the reverend gentleman whose sentence I have quoted is that his brain stopped working as a clock stops, years and years ago.