Ju, this year of crashing kingdoms and of vanished republics, when the map of Europe has not only been rolled up but torn to pieces and savagely trodden on, our standards of importance naturally become fantastically altered. Unless, for example, at least ten thousand people have ceased to live during the day there is a public murmur of "No news tonight." During the month of May the invasion and overthrow of yet another nation came to be assessed by the shrug of a shoulder. What significance in a thunderstorm when the whole earth shudders, what matter in a mere riot when chaos has come again?
So one looks back with longing and affection to the days when small things made big news. What a change has overtaken our whole vocal bulary of announcement! Now we are so deeply immersed in peril that the old usage of the word "danger" stirs only fond and smiling mem-ones. It would be pleasant indeed to leave the office one sunny afternoon and see a news ill once again announce, "England in Danger. Bradman's Huge Score." (It would, of course have been a batsman's happy holiday in May and June, with centuries flowing like the waters at Lodore.) Agreeable too would be the chance to' read "Big Kent Collapse" without imagining a bomb on Canterbury Cathedral or a bombardment which has shattered ten thousand tons of chalk from the white cliffs of Dover.
For years we have been growing callous to calamity. The atrocities that stirred Mr. Gladstone and warmed the compassionate cockles of the heart of Midlothian were a trifle matched with the abominations of the last ten years, which have come so thick and fast as to deaden pity by excess. We are inured to terrorism of all forms and qualities. Talk of cities in flames became as trivial as the news of some distant forest fire, provided the cities were far enough away. It is astounding that so small a distance can make so vast a difference to one's concern with what occurs. The shattering earthquakes of another land are as the tiny tremors of our own. British people, when they were most impatient with America's lack of interest in the brawls of Europe, did not sufficiently realize the cooling effect of three thousand miles of water on a man's attitude to news.
Distance lends detachment to the view. Conceive yourself as one who has lived safe and snug on the Pacific coast for years. At such a range of separation the roar of cannon seems but the buzzing of flies. Man is rarely an imaginative animal, and the best of us in conduct may for that reason be the worst in policy, so easily forgetting in our innocence that many people are- not as reasonable as ourselves. Indeed, the tragic history of the last decade has centred largely on the sad fact that decent people simply could not comprehend how far the indecency of others might drag them to shut, bang, and bolt the gates of mercy on mankind.
"Not much tonight." So we have lately muttered while the world's agony groaned to heaven, There was a time in this country when to keep up with politics one had only to be acquainted with the cases for and against the House of Lords, Home Rule for Ireland, and the Disestablishment of the Welsh Church. The result of a by-election' could be tremendous news, and Mr. F. E. Smith, M.P., denouncing a gentle bill for the rectification' of religious administration in Wales, could roar from the Tory benches at Westminster that this measure had "shocked the conscience of every Christian community in Europe."
It is true that this appalling piece of cant from a cynical and brazen lawyer politician caught the eye of G. K. Chesterton and evoked one of the finest pieces of satirical invective in the English language, his poem which ends:
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.