you but that which you allow to enter your mind?” No, I cannot. “Very well, then, you can control the universe by thought. You can gain happiness, health, peace of mind, and long life. By thought and meditation you can make for yourself a world of harmony, a consciousness which excludes everything that is ugly and painful and jarring.” I murmur that this is no doubt possible, but it seems a trifle selfish whilst so many human souls are struggling in the sea of trouble. I am sharply pulled up. “I thought you would be too immersed in the wretched folly of agitation to understand,” she says; “I came to show you the better way.” She is followed by the clothes enthusiast. He wears sandals and has discarded the abomination of starched linen. “We are forming a Society for the Revival of Greek Clothing,” he announces. “From the æsthetic and the hygienic points of view, nothing is more important than the clothes we wear.” I venture on a feeble Teufelsdröckh joke. He does not condescend to listen. “We must get rid of hideous trousers and feet-strangling skirts [I am lost in admiration over the indictment of the skirt, for I remember a certain reception in Washington
in the days of the snake-skirt when I stumbled and fell at a moment when a little dignity would have been my most precious possession]; we must wear loose white draperies amenable to the air and the washtub.” I quite agree, but raise some practical obstacles and a few conventional pegs of delay. They prove intolerable, and my visitor departs convinced that I am not one of the elect.
Missionaries of dietetics come in a motley procession. There is the man who believes we can eat anything provided we masticate everything with bovine thoroughness; there is the man who believes that we ought to eat nothing during long bouts of purgative fasting, and who lives cheerfully and inexpensively on hot water during two yearly periods of twenty days. There is the woman who has found the nearest approach to nectar and ambrosia in the uncooked fruits and vegetables of the earth, which, properly pounded, are digested, and make of our sluggish bodies fit receptacles for Olympian wisdom. There are the people who have discovered the one cause of all disease. It may be uric acid or cell proliferation or hard water—there is always a complementary cure. I listened one day with much interest
to an exposition of the evils of salt. Salted food, I was told, is the cause of our troubles. We are salted and dried until all power of recuperation is driven out of our nerves and muscles. I was asked to study the subject. The theory was well supported by scientific reasoning and evidence, and on the following evening I had thoroughly entered into the saltless ideal. A vision of the dispirited haddock had materially assisted my conclusion when a visitor was announced. He was preceded by a card showing impressively that he was a man of learning in theories of disease. “I have come,” he said, “in the hope that you will take an interest in my experiments and conclusions with regard to disease in general. I have discovered that the one cure for rheumatism, consumption, and cancer is salt, plenty of common salt.”
The trouble with all these people is not that they are all wrong. They are probably all right. It is a question of angles and quality of the grey matter of the brain. The trouble is the limitation of experience and outlook imposed by fate upon each individual.
A league or society is theoretically the one human institution which is akin to heaven.
You have an object and a programme. You know you are occupied with the most important task in the world. But you feel powerless alone. You send out your appeal for support and kindred souls flock to your banner. Can anything be more soul-satisfying than a community of those who think alike, who feel alike, and who work for the same end? Anarchy is impossible, and you decide on a constitution and rules for the management of your spiritual brotherhood. A committee is appointed to control the affairs of the union, and officials to carry out its wishes. Now you have the ideal of which you dreamt, the pure collective force which should prove irresistible. Friends within and enemies without.
But you have not excluded the canker of human differences. Your kindred souls discover that, though they think alike on the one point which drew you together, they differ strongly on others. There are other opinions, religious and political, than those which come within the purview of your little organization. You surprise some of your friends in the act of discussing your denseness in matters of which they have a firm and clear grasp. You begin to wonder how it is possible for
people who have such a perfect vision of certain necessary lines of reform to manifest such unmitigated stupidity in regard to others. If you are wise, you resign yourself to the inevitable divergence of mind; if they are wise, they agree to pardon your shortcomings.
Fanatics flower in a society like poppies in a wheat-field. They have lost sight of everything but the urgency of the cause. They are intolerant because they have no knowledge of human nature and no self-criticism wherewith to check the wild ideas that sprout beneath their immense self-confidence. They turn withering scorn on committees and officials who refuse to give effect to their suggestions to burn the House of Commons, or stop the traffic of London, or commit combined suicide in Hyde Park as a protest against the continuance of the iniquity which they denounce. They would do things in a different manner. They intend to show the world and politicians that their views cannot be ignored with impunity. For you and your lukewarm followers they have nothing but contempt—the contempt which is earned by the coward. The fanatic is troublesome, but comparatively easy to deal with. There is another product of