undisciplined, to submit to the code; and that the success of the assault results from the sheer defenceless niceness-the mingled altruism and humility of the people accused of conventionality. At all events, the fact is that our reticences have somehow become cases of cowardice, and our rejections forms of brutality. We are all a little pathetic in our credulity, and we are very like Moses Primrose at the fair. Well let us buy green spectacles if we must; but let us, as long as we can, refuse to look through them!

It may seem a far cry from "temperament" to social service. I have known a great many people who went in for social service, and I do not think it is. The motives of the heterogeneous foes of convention may lie as far apart as the Poles (one Pole is very like the other, by the way, as far as we can make out from Peary and Amundsen) but the object is the same: to destroy the complicated fabric which the centuries have lovingly built up. (Even if you call it "restoration," it is apt to amount to the same thing, as any good architect knows.) At the bar of Heaven, sober Roundheads and drunken rioters will probably be differently dealt with; but here on earth, both have been given to smashing stained-glass windows. Many of us do not believe in capital punishment, because thus society takes from a man what society cannot give. The iconoclasts do

the same thing; for civilization, whether it be perfect or not, is a fruit of time. Conventions are easy to come by, if you are willing to take conventions like those of the Central Australians. The difference between a perfected and a barbaric convention is a difference of refinement, in the old alchemical sense. A lot of the tabu business is too stupid and meaningless for words. Civilization has been a weeding-out process, controlled and directed by increasing knowledge. We have infinitely more conventions than the aborigines: we simply have not such silly ones. The foes of modern convention are not suggesting anything wiser, or better, or more subtle: they are only attacking all convention blindly, as if the very notion of tabu were wrong. The very notion of tabu is one of the rightest notions in the world. Better any old tabu than none, for a man cannot be said to be "on the side of the stars" at all, unless he makes refusals. What the foes of convention want is to have all tabu overthrown. It is very dull of them, for even if a cataclysm came and helped them out-even if we were all turned, over night, into potential fossils for the delight of future scientists the next beginnings of society would be founded on tabu. We shudder at the Central Australians; we should hate life on their terms. But I would rather live among the Warramunga than among the twentiethcentury anarchists, for I cannot conceive a

more odious society than one where nothing is considered indecent or impious. We may think that the mental agility of the Warramunga could be better applied. Well: in time, it will be. But they are lifted above the brute just in so far as they develop mental agility in the framing of a moral law, however absurd a one. I said that their conventions were almost too complicated for us to master. That, I fancy, is because any mind they have, they give to their conventions. It is the natural consequence of giving your mind to science and history and philology and art, that you simplify where you can; also, that your conventions become purified by knowledge. Even the iconoclasts of the present day do not want us to throw away such text-book learning as we have achieved. They do ask us, though, to throw away the racial inhibitions that we have been so long acquiring. Is it possible that they do not realize what a slow and difficult business it is to get any particular opinion into the instincts of a race? Only the "evolution" they are so fond of talking about can do that. Perhaps we ought to take comfort from the reflection. But it is easier to destroy than to build up; and they are quite capable of wasting a few thousand years of our time.

No: the iconoclasts want to bring us, if possible, lower than the Warramunga. Some of them might be shocked at the allegation, for

some of them, no doubt, are idealists—after the fashion of Jean-Jacques, be it understood. These are merely, one may say respectfully, mistaken: for they do not reckon with human nature any more than do the socialists. But the majority, I incline to believe, are merely the natural foes of dignity, of spiritual hierarchy, of wisdom perceived and followed. They object to guarded speech and action, because they themselves find self-control a nuisance. So, often, it is; but if the moral experience of mankind has taught us anything, it has taught us that, without self-control, you get no decent society at all. When the mistress of Lowood School told Mr. Brocklehurst that the girls' hair curled naturally, he retorted: "Yes, but we are not to conform to nature; I wish these girls to become children of grace." We do not sympathize with Mr. Brocklehurst's choice of what was to be objected to in nature; we do not, indeed, sympathize with him in any way, for he was a hypocrite. But none the less, it is better to be, in the right sense, a child of grace than a child of nature. Attila did not think so; and Attila sacked Rome. We may be sacked-the planet is used to these débâcles-but let us not, either as a matter of mistaken humility or by way of low strategy, pretend that the Huns were Crusaders!

THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH

T is pretty much taken for granted by decent

I

folk that the truth should be told in all

circumstances. "It is never permissible to lie" has been, ever since the Christian era came in, the common opinion, if not the common practice. And yet, which one of us has never lied, I will not say against his conscience, but for the very sake of his conscience? Conventional religion has been assumed to be our sole guide, while our actual conduct is usually based on the different, and more explicit, code of honor. Honor is not religion, though with real religion it has always been at peace; civilized manners are not religion, though, again, they have always been at peace with it. In the matter of lying, both honor and civilized manners have a great deal to say; and the fact that we realize this subconsciously is responsible for a great many minor perplexities.

Strictly speaking, in Candide's "best of possible worlds" lies should not pass human lips. There are many people who stick to the literal interpretation of the precept: ladies, for example, who retire to the back porch before they permit their maids to tell the unwelcome caller that they are "out." There, presumably,