I am pretty sure that some of them are the very same hooligans who trespass in my garden, rob my orchard, hack down my trees and scream outside my windows, though everyone in the neighbourhood knows that there is serious illness in my family. I am afraid I deal with them badly in the capacity of 'waits'. I neither forgive like a Christian nor turn the dog on them like an indignant householder. I pay the blackmail. I give, but give ungraciously, and make the worst of both worlds.

I would be silly to publish this fact... Not long ago some of my younger neighbours broke into a little pavilion or bungalow which stands in my garden and stole several objects -- curious weapons and an optical instrument. This time the police discovered who they were. As more than one of them had been convicted of similar crimes before, we had high hopes that some adequately deterrent sentence would be given. But I was warned: 'It'll all be no good if the old woman's on the bench.' I had, of course, to attend the juvenile court and all fell out pat as the warning had said. The -- let us call her -- Elderly Lady presided. It was abundantly proved that the crime had been planned and that it was done for gain: some of the swag had already been sold. The Elderly Lady inflicted a small fine. that is, she punished not the culprits but their parents. But what alarmed me more was her concluding speech to the prisoners. She told them that they must, they really must, give up these 'stupid pranks'....

...This little incident seems to me characteristic of our age. Criminal law increasingly protects the criminal and ceases to protect his victim. One might fear that we were moving towards a Dictatorship of the Criminals or (what is perhaps the same thing) mere anarchy. But that is not my fear; my fear is almost the opposite....

...on these principles, when the State ceases to protect me from hooligans I might reasonably, if I could, catch and trash them myself. When the State cannot or will not protect, 'nature' is come again and the right of self-protection reverts to the individual. But of course if I could and did I should be prosecuted. The Elderly Lady and her kind who are so merciful to theft would have no mercy on me; and I should be pilloried in the gutter Press as a 'sadist' by journalists who neither know nor care what that word, or any word, means.

What I fear, however, is not, or not chiefly, sporadic outbreaks of individual vengeance. I am more afraid, our conditions being so like that of the South after the American Civil War, that some sort of Ku Klux Klan may appear and that this might eventually develop into something like a Right or Central revolution. For those who suffer are chiefly the provident, the resolute, the men who want to work who have built up, in the face of implacable discouagement, some sort of life worth preserving and wish to preserve it.... They are, in fact, the bearers of what little moral, intellectual, or economic vitality remains. They are not nonentities. There is a point at which their patience will snap....

...Revolutions seldom cure the evil against which they are directed; they always beget a hundred others. Often they perpetuate the old evil under a new name. We may be sure that, if a Ku Klux Klan arose, its ranks would soon be chiefly filled by the same sort of hooligans who provoked it. A Right of Central revolution would be as hypocritical, filthy and ferocious as any other. My fear is lest we should be making it more probable.

This may be judged an article unfit for the season of peace and goodwill. Yet there is a connection. Not all kinds of peace are compatible with all kinds of goodwill, nor do all those who say 'Peace, peace' inherit the blessing promised to the peacemakers. The real pacificus is he who promotes peace, not he who gasses about it. Peace, peace... we won't be hard on you... it was only a boyish prank... you had a neurosis... promise not to do it again... out of this in the long run I do not think either goodwill or peace will come. Planting new primroses on the primrose path is no long-term benevolence.

There! They're at it again. 'Ark, the errol hygel sings.' They're knocking louder. Well, they come but fifty times a year. Boxing Day is only two and a half weeks ahead; then perhaps we shall have a little quiet in which to remember the birth of Christ.

(Boxing Day: the first week-day after Christmas... when making room for new things the old things are boxed up and given to charities)

 Reggie Keith