"I asked Old Biggs (as the Duke of Racton used to be called) what he thought of Charlie Wilson. Old Biggs answered, 'Man like that's one of two things: a Fanatic or a Fanatic.' I thought this very funny."—St. Germans Sporting Memoirs, Vol. II, p. 186.

This is a kind of man whom we all love and yet all desire to moderate. He is excessive only in good, but his excess therein is dangerous. He proceeds from less to more; first irritated, then exasperated, then mad. He will not tolerate the necessary foibles of mankind. No, nor even their misunderstandings. He himself commonly takes refuge in some vice or other, but a small one, and from this bastion defends himself against all comers.

The Fanatic will exaggerate the operations of war. If it be necessary in the conquest of a province to murder certain women, he will cry shame blindly, without consideration of[Pg 308] martial conditions or remembrance that what we do in war is absolved by indemnities thereafter following. It is the same with the death of children in warfare, whether these be starved to death in concentration camps or more humanely spitted, or thrown down wells, or dealt with in some other fashion, such as the braining of them against walls and gateposts: nothing will suit the Fanatic in these matters but a complete and absolute abstention from them, without regard to strategy or tactics or any other part of military science. Now many a man shall argue against practices of one sort or another, as against excesses. But the Fanatic is nothing so reasonable, being bound by a law of his nature or rather a lack of law, to violent outburst with no restraint upon it, and to impotent gnashings.

It is so also in affairs of State when peace reigns, for the Fanatic is for ever denouncing what all men know must be and making of common happenings an uncommon crime.[Pg 309] Thus, when a minister shall borrow of a money-lender certain sums which this last generously puts before him without condition or expense, what must your Fanatic do, but poke and pry into the whole circumstance, and when the usurer has his just reward, and is made a Peer to settle our laws for us, the Fanatic will go vainly about from one newspaper to another seeking which shall print his foolish "protest" (as he calls it). Mark you also that the Fanatic is quite indifferent to this: that his foolishness is of no effect. He will roar in an empty field as loud as any bull and challenge all men to meet him, and seems well pleased whether they come or no.

It is of the fanatical temper to regard some few men as heroes, or demigods, and then again, these having failed in something, to revile them damnably. Thus by the old religious sort you will find the Twelve Apostles in the Gospel very foolishly revered and made much of as though they were so many Idols, but let one of these (Judas to wit) show statesmanship and a manly[Pg 310] sense, and Lord! how the Fanatic does rail at him!

So it is also with foreign nations. The Fanatic has no measure there and speaks of them as though they were his province, seein............