its degradation than a sort of carelessness, at once of hurry and fatigue,
with which it flings down its argument--or rather its refusal to argue.
It does not even write sophistry: it writes anything. It does not so much
poison the reader's mind as simply assume that the reader hasn't got one.
For instance, one of these papers printed an article on Sir Stuart Samuel,
who, having broken the great Liberal statute against corruption, will
actually, perhaps, be asked to pay his own fine--in spite of the fact that
he can well afford to do so. The article says, if I remember aright, that
the decision will cause general surprise and some indignation. That any
modern Government making a very rich capitalist obey the law will cause
general surprise, may be true. Whether it will cause general indignation
rather depends on whether our social intercourse is entirely confined to
Park Lane, or any such pigsties built of gold. But the journalist
proceeds to say, his neck rising higher and higher out of his collar, and
his hair rising higher and higher on his head, in short, his resemblance
to the Dickens' original increasing every instant, that he does not mean
that the law against corruption should be less stringent, but that the
burden should be borne by the whole community. This may mean that
whenever a rich man breaks the law, all the poor men ought to be made to
pay his fine. But I will suppose a slightly less insane meaning. I will
suppose it means that the whole power of the commonwealth should be used
to prosecute an offender of this kind. That, of course, can only mean
that the matter will be decided by that instrument which still pretends to
represent the whole power of the commonwealth. In other words, the
Government will judge the Government.

Now this is a perfectly plain piece of brute logic. We need not go into
the other delicious things in the article, as when it says that "in old
times Parliament had to be protected against Royal invasion by the man in
the street." Parliament has to be protected now against the man in the