Essays in Rebellion

Worse still, the Archbishop had mentioned "the average voter in tramcar or railway train," and the words had called up a haunting vision of disgust. He often said that he had no...

"My mother ain't been to see me," whined Looney, with unrestrained sobs; "and Clem says 'e's wrote to tell 'er she'd best not come no more, 'cos I'm so bad."

"Besides these superb rewards," the showman continued, "the rest of the judges present sixteen consolation prizes, and Mr. Crawley, the eminently respected provision-merchant ro...

I do not know. A man may say what he pleases about intellect devoid of senses, or about the felicity of infinity. One statement may be as true as the other, or the reverse of bo...

To what can we look? Prudence may save us in the end, for if the spirits utterly devour us, they will find they cannot live themselves. In the end, Nature may adjust their birth...

Few have given the Home Office credit for the amount of interesting and cheap amusement it then afforded by parcelling out the country among the military authorities. In a perio...

Nationality possesses that demonic and incalculable quality from which almost anything may be expected in the way of marvel, just as certain spiky plants that have not varied wi...

The friends of Swift--the men who could write like this--men like Bolingbroke, Pope, Arbuthnot, Addison, Steele, and Gay--were no sentimentalists; they rank among the shrewdest...

There is very little danger of rebellion going too far. The barriers confronting it are too solid, and the Idol of the Herd is too carefully enshrined. A perpetual rebellion of...

"Sit down!" cried some. "Oh, shut it!" cried others. All looked at him with the amused curiosity of people in a tramcar looking at a talkative child. The usher bustled across th...

"Why do the common people love to add 'o' to their words?" Mr. Clarkson reflected. "Is it that they unconsciously appreciate 'o' as the most beautiful of vowel sounds? But I won...

Holland was in February 1911 compelled to buy twenty-four inferior big guns from Krupp, without contract or competition, for the defence of her Javanese possessions, which no on...

One memory almost alone still keeps a familiar air, suggesting something that lies perhaps permanently at the basis of man's nature. The present-day detractors of all things new...

Yes, it is all very beautiful, and all very true. Stevenson himself, like Caesar, received the death he wished for, and, whether in reason or in passion, every soul among us wou...

For certain crimes mankind has ordained penalties of exceptional severity, in order to emphasise a general abhorrence. In Rome, for example, a parricide, or the murderer of any...

In his investigations among the "sword-dancers" of Northern England, Mr. Cecil Sharp has discovered that at Earsdon, after the usual captain's song, a strange interlude occurs,...

When writers are so different, it is queer that every age should have a distinguishing spirit. Each writer is as different in "style" as in look, and his words reveal him just a...

It is not crime and savagery that characterise the unknown lands where the working classes of London chiefly live. Matthew Arnold said our lower classes were brutalised, and he...

"Johnson's right upper-cut is described as the piston of an ocean greyhound making twenty-seven knots," said the man, taking no notice of the answer, and speaking in awestruck t...

"Remember!" We hear again the solemn tone, warning of mortality. We see again the mummy, drawn between tables struck silent in their revelry. We listen to the slave whispering i...

To such a mood, how consolatory must be the vision of that muffled figure, with the two-handed engine, always following close! And to Heine himself the consolation came with esp...

It is a contribution of which we may well be proud--we of whom Wordsworth wrote that we must be free or die. Whatever the failures of unsympathetic self-esteem, Macaulay's spiri...

Is it inevitable? Is it to be desired? If it were dying out in the world, should we make efforts to preserve war artificially, as we preserve sport, which would die out unless w...

Their spell of labour finished, the natives stretched themselves in the shadow of the enclosure wall, and slept, while we sat languidly looking over the steaming water at the sh...