that stage, yet the habit it engendered in our race remains ingrained in
the nervous system, so that none but a few of the naturally highest and
most civilised dispositions have really outgrown it. Most people still
think there is somebody to blame for every human misfortune. "Who fills
the butcher's shops with large blue flies?" asked the poet of the
Regency. He set it down to "the Corsican ogre." For the Tory Englishmen
of the present day it is Mr. Gladstone who is most often and most
popularly envisaged as the author of all evil. For the Pope, it is the
Freemasons. There are just a few men here and there in the world who can
see that when misfortunes come, circumstances, or nature, or (hardest of
all) we ourselves have brought them. The common human instinct is still
to get into a rage, and look round to discover whether there's any other
fellow standing about unobserved, whose head we can safely undertake to
punch for it.

"It's all the fault of those confounded paid agitators."




V.

_AMERICAN DUCHESSES._


Every American woman is by birth a duchess.

There, you see, I have taken you in. When you saw the heading, "American
Duchesses," you thought I was going to purvey some piquant scandal about
high-placed ladies; and you straightway began to read my essay. That