| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Criminal Sociology by Enrico Ferri: of whom quotes the others in one of his essays on criminal
statistics, now undeservedly forgotten, though they abound in
striking and profound observation.
But, as for France in those days, so for Italy to-day, the
statistics of succeeding years quickly proved that what official
optimism and national self-complacency spoke of as pessimism on
our part was but a conscientious inference from lamentable facts,
established in every country by the influence of civilisation on
crime, which I have described in preceding pages.
After these general statements we ought logically to watch the
periodic movement of each leading category of crimes and offences
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: heard a man one forenoon in a crowd during the earlier years of the war,
the miserable years before we waked from our trance of neutrality, while
our chosen leaders were still misleading us.
Do you remember those unearthly years? The explosions, the plots, the
spies, the Lucitania, the notes, Mr. Bryan, von Bernstorff, half our
country--oh, more than half!--in different or incredulous, nothing
prepared, nothing done, no step taken, Theodore Roosevelt's and Leonard
Wood's almost the only voices warning us what was bound to happen, and to
get ready for it? Do you remember the bulletin boards? Did you grow, as I
did, so restless that you would step out of your office to see if
anything new had happened during the last sixty minutes--would stop as
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: it is unreadable. There is only one way of dramatizing an idea;
and that is by puttmg on the stage a human being possessed
by that idea, yet none the less a human being with all the human
impulses which make him akin and therefore interesting to us.
Bunyan, in his Pilgrim's Progress, does not, like his unread
imitators, attempt to personify Christianity and Valour: he
dramatizes for you the life of the Christian and the Valiant Man.
Just so, though I have shown that Wotan is Godhead and Kingship,
and Loki Logic and Imagination without living Will (Brain without
Heart, to put it vulgarly); yet in the drama Wotan is a
religiously moral man, and Loki a witty, ingenious, imaginative
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