The Men of the West 39 



It has been my unhappy experience that most 

 of those who live by the seaboard are — tricky, as 

 were, doubtless, the traders of Tyre and Sidon. 

 And there is small excuse for their trickiness 

 inasmuch as to them, the citizens of a great republic, 

 have been given advantages denied to the strivers 

 in less favoured countries. All these knaves know 

 the right, yet they choose the wrong. In the old 

 world you find the seller putting the biggest straw- 

 berries on the top of the pottle, his smallest pota- 

 toes in the bottom of the sack, water into the milk, 

 sand into the sugar, and so forth. In the West, 

 where neither poverty, nor vice, nor disease, nor 

 ignorance can be pleaded in excuse, these tricks 

 assume a darker complexion. 



It is true that the worst offenders come from the 

 East and from Europe, for the West is a sanctuary 

 to the pariahs of the nations. Here, mind-healers, 

 clairvoyants, astrologers, card-sharpers and the like, 

 flourish as the bay tree. These are the dregs of the 

 older civilisations, the scum of the new, and there- 

 fore the more readily seen. Perhaps, if choice must 

 be made of two evils, it is better that sewage should 

 be spread upon the fields than lie festering in cel- 

 lars. The bad that has come to and is in the West 

 lies upon the surface of all things, in full view of a 

 too hypercritical world. If this scum be not soon 

 skimmed and cast to the void it will filter through 

 every stratum of society, as it has done elsewhere, 

 and then the last state of the West, outwardly im- 

 maculate, will prove worse than the first. I believe, 

 personally, that the period of purification has begun. 



There is said to be honour amongst thieves. 



