Syme's eyes were bright with a sympathetic curiosity.

"What do you do, then?" he said.

"The work of the philosophical policeman," replied the man in
blue, "is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary
detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest
thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The
ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime
has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime
will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful
thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and
intellectual crime. We were only just in time to prevent the
assassination at Hartle pool, and that was entirely due to the fact
that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly understood a
triolet."

"Do you mean," asked Syme, "that there is really as much connection
between crime and the modern intellect as all that?"

"You are not sufficiently democratic," answered the policeman, "but
you were right when you said just now that our ordinary treatment
of the poor criminal was a pretty brutal business. I tell you I am
sometimes sick of my trade when I see how perpetually it means
merely a war upon the ignorant and the desperate. But this new
movement of ours is a very different affair. We deny the snobbish
English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous criminals.
We remember the Roman Emperors. We remember the great poisoning
princes of the Renaissance. We say that the dangerous criminal is