play-rooms, the works of art and ornament, the
organised entertainments, the cheerful gardens;
are all necessary and essential to the subtle
process by which these poor idiots are coaxed,
and petted, and insensibly led into developing
their latent faculties, and assuming, as near as
possible, the attributes of useful and intelligent
human beings. One item of expense may be
reasonably objected to—that of the mere
ornamental parts of such an edifice. It surely can
never be necessary to burden a charitable
institution with an enormous rent in the form of
interest of capital, or an incubus in the much
more depressing form of a heavy building debt.

FETISHES.

WHAT is a fetish? Generally a bundle of
rags, a mass of rubbish, and a muttered charm;
sometimes a tree, a stone, a bird, or a beast, or
it may be a filthy insect, or it may be a mere
place. Out of these materials the poor
benighted savages, on whom we spend millions
to bring them to a clearer sense of truth, make a
something which thenceforth rules their lives and
determines their actions—a dread, a power, a
forbidding influence, an incorporate denial to
human wish and need, a shadowy scourge held
over all their life. A fetish is a bugbear; and
a bugbear is a moral spectre, miserably thin but
tremendously strong—a vampire; which is a
ghost that will not lie quietly with the dead
body, but wanders abroad, viewless and
intangible, to feed on the living juices of healthy
men.

Now, it is all very well to spend millions on
the African savages for the purpose of inducing
them to despise their fetishes, and to go about
their forests and villages like reasonable men,
without starting or stumbling over their own
rag dolls, but I should like to know in what are
we so very much their superiors? We laugh
at their fetishes, but are our own much better?
Analyse them, and I think we shall come to
rags, rubbish, a muttered charm of words, a
special place, a few bones and stones and
splinters of wood, as making up the most of
them; sometimes to beasts and insects as well
—at least in symbol—for the British lion is a
hustings and fine-writing fetish to this day; the
Gallic cock, the French eagle, and the Napoleonic
bee, express, each of them, a different fetish to
the French mind; and "the bird of Freedom,
that makes its home in the setting sun," is a
symbolic fetish to Cousin Jonathan, which not
the bravest dare insult, or say to its face what a
miserable cheat and impostor it is. Let us,
however, lift up the skirts of a few of our own
rag and rubbish fetishes, and leave other
people's alone. Throwing stones when we live
in glass houses is neither a wise nor profitable
employment, and is rather apt to lead to what
old writers used to call "a bloody cock's-comb,"
in nine cases out of ten well deserved.

And first, there is the law, with its silk gowns
and its stuff ones, its horsehair wigs and
cabalistic spells, its javelin-men, and its wonderful
distinction of persons administering; and if all
this be not fetishism—the fetishism of adherence
to an obsolete past—I should like to know what
is. Why should a respectable old gentleman be
smothered in a huge mass of powdered Charles
the Second big-curled horse-tail, which makes
his poor old head ache and his poor old eyes
dim and feverish, because it was the fashion
generations ago? Why should he be huddled
up in a dense cloud of silk and ermine in the
dog-days, when he is already swathed in the
conventional garments of broadcloth and fine
linen, which most gentlemen find quite sufficient
for daily wear? Why should fine handsome
personable men, with Brutus crops and coal-
black whiskers, make themselves frights in funny
little wigs with tails and a bow at the back, and
a bald patch on the top commemorative of the
tonsure? And why should they look like maniacs
who had borrowed their wives' cloaks, with their
coat-tails depending below their loosely flapping
gowns? Why should all this be if we were not
savages at heart, and afraid of our own stupid
fetishes at Westminster? People say that the
majesty of the law demands this rag-dollism;
also that it demands the muttered charm which
constitutes an oath, and after which a falsehood
becomes quite a different thing to what it was
before. (It was only a sin before, now it is a
crime; and the two things are as different as the
grub and the fly in the scale of social morals. I
say nothing of their relation to absolute truth.)
It may be so; we ignorant outsiders cannot,
perhaps, judge of what habitués deem majesty, but
I must say that to this ignorant outsider now
writing, the rags and rubbish and muttered
charms enumerated, seem to be merely the lowest
kind of fetishism, not a bit more respectable
than what the African savages hang round their
medicine men.

Are not all legal instruments, too, of the
nature and being of a fetish? When "This
Indenture," in grand flourishes, witnesseth a
contract of partnership—perhaps of marriage—
between A. B. and C. D., and then flounders on.
through a wilderness of words which I defy any
of the uninitiated to understand in their true
meaning, seeing that they seem to express everything
they do not intend, and to burke everything
they do; when it disdains quiet commonplace
nineteenth-century English, and still sticks
to it sold Norman-French and abominable Latin;
what is that but a fetish, just as absolute as
those which we strain so many missionary nerves
to grind into powder and cast into the fire? And
why—following up the track—should it be one
of the functions of my Right Reverend Father in
God the Lord Bishop of Anywhere, to give me his
gracious permission to take Miss Rosa Mundy to
be my lawful wife? And why cannot I take Miss
Rosa without this permission, and still remain
Respectable? That young person and I have made
up our minds to plunge into the greatest of all
the seas of chance, and for the life of me I cannot
understand what my Right Reverend Father
in God has to do with the matter. I know