Only the other day there was printed in a newspaper (what a lot of things they print in newspapers!) five lines which read thus:
"Calcutta, Thursday.
"An hour before the Viceroy left Calcutta on Wednesday for the last time lightning struck the flag over Government House, tearing it to shreds. This is considered to be an omen by the natives."
The Devil they did! A superstitious chap, your native, and we have outgrown such things. But it is really astonishing when you come to think of it how absurdly credulous the human race has been for thousands of years about omens, and still is—everywhere except here. And by the way, what a curious thing it is that[Pg 83] only in one country, and only in one little tiny circle of it should this terrible vice have been eradicated from the human mind! If one were capable of paradox one would say that the blessing conferred upon us few enlightened people in England was providential; but that would be worse superstition than the other. There seems to be a tangle somewhere. Anyhow, there it is: people have gone on by the million and for centuries and centuries believing in omens. It is an illusion. It is due to a frame of mind. That which the enlightened person easily discovers to be a coincidence, the Native, that is, the person living in a place, thinks to be in some way due to a Superior Power. It is a way Natives have. Nothing warps the mind like being a Native.
The Reform Bill passed in 1832 and destroyed not only the Pot-Wallopers, but also the ancient Constitution of the country. From that time onwards we have been free. When the thing was thoroughly settled (and the old Poor Law was being got rid of into the[Pg 84] bargain), the old House of Lords, and the old House of Commons, they caught fire, "and they did get burnt down to the ground." Those are the very words of an old man who saw it happen and who told me about it. The misfortune was due to the old tallies of the Exchequer catching fire, and this silly old man, who saw it happen (he was a child of six at the time), has always thought it was an Omen. It has been explained to him, not only by good, kind ladies who go and visit him and see that he gets no money or beer, but also from the Pulpit of St. Margaret's Church, Westminster (where he regularly attends Divine Service by kind permission of the Middle Class, and in the vain hope of cadging alms), that there is no such thing as Providence, and that if he lets his mind dwell on Omens he will end by believing in God. But the old man is much too old to receive a new idea, so he goes on believing that the burning of old St. Stephen's was an Omen.
Not so the commercial traveller, who told me in an hotel the other day the story of the[Pg 85] market-woman of Devizes, to exemplify the gross superstitions of our fathers.
It seems that the market-woman, sometime when George III was King, had taken change of a sovereign on market-day, from a purchaser, when there were no witnesses, and then, in the presence of witnesses, demanded the change again. The man most solemnly affirmed that he had paid her, to which she replied: "If I have taken your money may God strike me dead." The moment these words were out of the market-............