of all words, those whereof my English language and race have reason to be proudest, meaning as they do, the Justice which measures competing instruments and equalizes advantages, pits only equal rivals against each other and watches that only skill and prowess, qualities useful to all, or even good luck coming by turns to everyone, should determine advantage. This is another Justice; this Goddess who, instead of carrying the blood-rusted sword and the bandage over her eyes, holds in her stainless hands the measuring tape and the surveyor's rod, the microscope and test-tube; a Justice gifted, moreover, with unclouded sight. Since in such matters the mechanical poise of scales is not enough. For what is it which those scales contain, and when and wherefore came it to be put there? Guilt and Innocence, answer old-fashioned codes; one flying up to heaven (as in medieval pictures of the Angel of Judgment), the other sucked down into hell. Nay: but whence this guilt? How long the tenure and status of this innocence? Guilty to-day or innocent, as the case may be; but what of yesterday, last year, last century, and preceding ages? German ruthlessness to France in this last century; but French boastful cruelty, time after time ever since, as Alfred de Musset dared to boast: "Notre Condé triomphant déchira sa robe verte," reminding those who claimed their German Rhine that there had been: "La trace altière du pied de nos chevaux marquée dans votre sang."

Like all else in the universe such things are subject to strange metamorphose, often of innocence into guilt, guilt into innocence. They have a genealogy; and looking into that you descry queer intermarriages; the wickedness of one side incubated, nay engendered, by the remembrance of the wickedness of the other. Therefore this newer sort of Justice is no mere weigher of items: hers are the implements of analysis, pursuing qualities as the chemist or the physician, until from the gross and changing everyday appearance, they resolve into their ultimate elements. Their ultimate elements, and also how often! their common ones: the similar needs, actions, instinct, constitution of soul and body, alike everywhere, and to be found at the crucible's bottom whether what you put in for examination was the repulsive poisonous thing called Sin,

or the inestimable, pure virtue such as only abstract thought, but never real life, produces, even as in the chemist's laboratory. At that rate, what becomes of Justice? Why, this is Justice, or should be. The Justice who sifts, who decomposes; who prevents, because she understands. The Justice of Man foreshadowed by Christ, by Buddha, by the Stoics, by all the greatest men, discarding retribution. Or rather leaving retribution to those great inhuman, impersonal Forces which, admitting no intention, ignoring innocence or guilt, visit infraction of their laws even to the seventieth generation. Retribution can be just only when considered as Cause and Effect. That is a fact for man to understand and submit to; not surely for man to handle, since man himself is but the smallest fragment thereof.

Is it not time, if not to sheathe that reeking sword of Justice, at all events, dear fellow-victims, to hide it, as our fathers did the hangman's cottage, in void, ill-omened places, remote from the abode of decent folk? Is it not, above all, time to leave off boasts of unsheathing the foul, clumsy thing which is a token of our ineptitude, even like the trades whereof we are still too stupid to be rid, the butcher's and the hangman's : neighbours to the knacker and the prostitute.

So, in our speaking and preaching at least, let us begin to put the justice who analyses and neutralizes, and knows neither guilt nor innocence, in the place of the superannuated Justice, who tries to make things equal by adding a second blinded eye to the first one; a second man killed by the law, to the first man killed by the murderer.

THE HARMONIUM OF SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS AND THE TRUMP OF JUDGMENT

I

"When the hymn-book concealed the bayonet and the harmonium the cannon . . ." G. Bernard Shaw said that, in an interview reported in the Daily News of December 17th, 1918.

I copy it out because, while having been and still being, absurdly pleased with myself for my Harmonium of SelfRighteousness, I am, if possible, still better pleased at finding that this item of my orchestral scoring should coincide with that of so accomplished a (musical) critic as G.B.S.

II

Perhaps, however, I have been unduly hard on poor SelfRighteousness, assigning to her that particular Pecksniffian instrument. And alas, although I have not had the courage to say it in my Ballet, there sits also in Satan's Orchestra no less an allegorical personage than Righteousness herself. So now, in the seclusion of these notes, let me add that the instrument this bona fide Virtue plays upon, terrifying herself as well as others, is the Trump of Judgment.

I have said that seeking for the responsibilities is oftenest, and especially at this present moment, the search for someone on whom to vent your hatred, when indeed it is not also the search for someone to pay your war-bills. Such were the blasts of the trumpets which Hebrew financiers carried processionally round Jericho, reducing it to ruins.

The war has, however, taught me to discern another mode, less blatant but of mysterious paralysing potency, of playing on that Trump of Judgment. In this case Righteousness does not ask about responsibility for what has already happened; it warns you to take heed of the Responsibility for what may happen. "Would you, mutters that muffled blast ominous of future enormity," would you take on yourself the Responsibility of opposing This War when by doing so you might bring on ten years hence a three times worse one? Will you take on yourself the Responsibility of indefinitely prolonging This War by encouraging the Enemy with your peace talk? Will you load on to your conscience, and that of your contemporaries, the Responsibility for the slaughter of unborn millions destined to perish unless a Knock-Out Blow knocks militarism out of existence once for all?" And variations on these themes ad lib.

These owl-hootings of the Trump of Judgment have silenced and paralysed many righteous and otherwise courageous

persons during these War years, playing upon their honest scruples. Indeed it takes a certain sceptical levity, or in the case of conscientious objectors, a certain fanatical righteousness of one's own, to resist the clammy impact on men's conscience of those words "take the responsibility.'

These are appeals, more efficacious far than any which can be made to reason; appeals to primæval, hidden, habits of superstitious awe, useful no doubt in their day and place, when, for instance, cannibal anthropoids were educated to civic virtues by the mystic roaring of pieces of wood swung quickly round at the end of bits of cord, in such a way as not to be distinguished from the voice of the Whatever-It-May-HappenTo-Be-Deity. Such virtuous emotions still lie potential in our enlightened selves, fostered by nursery methods and Semitic literature; and Righteousness (who, unlike Self-Righteousness, suffers from queasiness and weak knees) occasionally calls them forth without our recognizing the antique superstitious strains.

Since I maintain that superstition is a matter less of dogma than of attitude; less of what we believe than of how we believe it, whether standing erect and looking boldly into the however inscrutable darkness; or cowering, face downwards, even in broad daylight. And this apart from the question of how we have come to that belief, whatever it be, although how we got it lends a quality to our belief, and is an indication of our attitude. But how we came by a belief affects this subject of the Trump of Judgment played on by (and playing on) Righteousness, only because, once a belief can thus affect our attitude, we become quite sure that it has been obtained in the very best way. What does the Word of God say about it? asks Bunyan, whenever he hits up against Mr. Ignorance; and it does not occur either to Bunyan or to Mr. Ignorance to add the further query: "How do we know it is the Word of God?" Similarly when we pacifists are asked whether we will take the responsibility of the awful things which may happen in consequence of our views, it is quite useless to ask our contemporaries "how they know that such awful things are in the least likely to happen?' Or how they can know that such awfulness will be more awful than, indeed as awful as,

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that which, thanks to their scruples about future wars, or the prolongation of the present war, is happening at this present moment.

The voice of the Prophet, the appeal to that darkness called the Future, has the power, like other superstitious manifestations, of making the hair of our bodies, like Job's, to stand up.

It is some satisfaction, if anything can be satisfaction in such an evil Present, to remember that when those, among whom I am proud to be numbered, originally opposed the war and afterwards clamoured for a peace by negotiation, or at least a statement of war-aims, we did not have recourse to any such blood-curdling appeals to scruples, to such prophecies of a future worse than the present. We did not say 66 Will you take the responsibility of this war?"—a war of diplomats some called it in 1914! possibly lasting four years and more? Of its costing millions of casualties and millions of money, of its establishing a regime of Dora and Militarism, of its landing Europe in bankruptcy, famine and anarchic revolution ?" None of these things did we suggest; to most of us they did not so much as suggest themselves. I, for one, imagined in my ignorance that a modern war must be as much briefer and less cruel as a modern operation is briefer and less cruel than on old-fashioned one. By Christmas it must be over; or surely by Easter! What we protested against was our country, any country going into war; because we knew that the best, shortest and most merciful war, must mean death and mutiliaton, waste of wealth; and must mean hatred. What we protested against was the notion that war could be the less of two evils; it was war as war; because in our eyes war was an incalculable evil, a stupid, obscene, superannuated thing, an artificially kept-up survival from the past, unfit for decent moderns. It is, as I said, some satisfaction to know that we did not play upon people's fears of the unknown; that we did not talk of responsibilities; that we blew no Trump of Judgment; that what came was not the fulfilment of our ill-omened prophecies; that we did not say "you will see"; that we do not say now we knew best."

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March, 1919.