THE REAL ISSUE

THE FOLLOWING incident took place the other day outside a crowded cafe in Paris. It also took place outside half a hundred other cafes in Paris and half a million other cafes scattered through about two-thirds of Christendom. The incident or something like it, was so natural as to seem trivial in such places; and probably nobody noticed it except two persons seated near that one small table. One of them was a wealthy American lady who had seen the sights of Paris. The other was a journalist, astray in foreign parts, who had resolutely refused to see them.

There sat at this small table a poor Frenchman with his wife and child; he was rather shabbier than what we should call an artisan, but he was probably a small shopkeeper; he was independent; it had never occurred to him to pretend to be a gentleman. He and his wife each proceeded to sip a very tall glass of very light beer, called a bock, and to look out cheerfully at the coloured lights and the motley procession of mankind passing under them. The little boy threw his arms round his father's neck with sudden affection; for he was quite ignorant, had never read even the most elementary text-book of Psycho-Analysis and did not know anything about Oedipus. Then his father gave him, equally impulsively, a gulp out of his glass of beer. The little boy then turned and embraced his mother, who also, moved by a sense of symmetry and equality, gave him another gulp out of her glass of beer. At that moment a lame man came by begging; and the man at the table (who would have been turned away from many of our respectable houses as a beggar himself), took some small coins from his pocket and gave them to the child, with a few words in an undertone. The child then gave them to the beggar. That was all. But one of the two strangers in that city knew he had been looking at the palladium and high citadel, round which rages the whole human war of our civilization and our century; and that all men are divided precisely and sharply by what they think of that one thing. Those who understand it are on one side and those who do not understand it on the other. The former see a thousand things and generally say very little about them. They understand that ritual is natural and not artificial. They understand what is really meant by the equality of the sexes: "In this we both have a part and he in us, equally."

They understand that the world ends when that trinity is really broken, whether by confounding the persons or dividing the substance. They understand the word `sacrament', which is simply senseless gibberish to everybody else. They understand that politics and economics and every thing practical means providing the huge human cafe with such tablesbut separate tables. They understand that when this has been done as fully and fairly as possible, there will still always be somebody limping by; and that he must not be forgotten. Above all, they understand the impulse that makes the most innocent the intermediary and the almoner; they understand propitiation and the priest.

There are also other kinds of people. For the well-dressed American rose from her table with a sort of snort and went on her way to see the sights of Paris. We must not be hard on her; in truth the poor lady suffered from delusions; for she laboured under the extraordinary notion that she had seen ignorant people giving a child Alcohol; and she was ridden with a sort of nightmare, to the effect that a beggar is a horrible thing.