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moment that we set the world an example of corruption in our big cities unparalleled anywhere in the world, we cannot tolerate peoples governing themselves by other forms than our own. And support intolerance by plane and tank, by warship and bazooka. To paraphrase the old biblical saw, “The good that we would do we do not; but the evil which we would not, that we do.” 56 And a fear of some disaster is companioned secretly within us by a yearning for that same disaster, swiftand soundless. A padding dread within will not be still.
    We seem to be going on the strange assumption that if we can but put our fears on a mass scale, they will, belonging thus to all of us, be somehow wiser. We have come to the point where, in order to avoid the face of our own psychosis, we insist that all good men be psychotic.
    For if we have not, as a nation, gone psychotic, how is it that we now honor most those whom we once most despised? Now the professional perjurer is called an “informant”—we used to call them something else. Blackmail in the name of “anti-Communism” is now dignified by the name of “research services.” Though we always believed, by and large, in rugged individualism, we didn’t until now like the idea of dog eat dog. If we don’t, what is the odious hulk of Fat Pat McCarran doing in the Senate? What is a man like McCarthy, whose mentality never equipped him for anything more than dealing three-card monte, doing there? Never before in our history has a man so puny-minded as Jenner been dignified by the title of Senator.
    The late American humorist Jake Falstaff once did a prophetic little skit called
Alice in Justice-Land:
    “ ‘I hope you will not be impatient with me,’ said Alice, ‘I’m really quite interested in this system, and I would like to know more about it.’
    “ ‘It’s very sane and very human,’ said the White Knight. ‘If you hate your neighbor as you love yourself, you don’t charge him with being a hateful person. You call up the police and tell themthat his automobile is parked without a taillight. That’s our system exactly. Only we carry it a step farther. Our system has been made so perfect that the taillight doesn’t have to be out. It can be proved that it
might
go out—that it’s
potentially
out.’
    “ ‘The whole system seems to be predicated on the word might,’ said Alice.
    “ ‘Might,’ said the White Knight, solemnly, ‘makes right.’
    “ ‘If you charge a man with the crime he really committed, your prosecution is limited to one count. But if you charge him with something else, you have the whole book of statutes to choose from.’
    “ ‘Doesn’t it happen sometimes that a man gets free of everything?’ Alice asked.
    “ ‘Oh, certainly. But the system provides even for that. By that time he has spent all his money on litigation, his reputation is ruined, and he has spent as much time in jail as he would have spent on the original charge anyhow.’
    “ ‘Then,’ said Alice, in sad bewilderment, ‘am I to understand that most of the people in jail are innocent?’
    “ ‘Every one,’ said the White Knight tolerantly but wearily, ‘every one in the world, my dear child, is innocent of something.’ ” 57
    We have come to a time, George Bernanos wrote,when evil is in its first beginnings. A time of the disaster swift and soundless. A time for the great gray wolves that run the winter wilderness. A time when suspicion has become an honorable trade.
    “There can be no doubt,” Kafka’s doomed wanderer decided, “that behind all the actions of this court of justice, that is to say in my case, behind my arrest and today’s interrogation, there is a great organization at work … And the significance of this great organization, gentlemen? It consists in this, that innocent persons are accused of guilt, and senseless proceedings are put in motion against them.…” 58

… T
hen one of them opened his frock coat and out of a