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There is nothing easier, few things pleasanter, than denouncing other people’s vices; and there is always a feeling in our minds that we sometimes manage to

Compound for sins we are inclined to

By damning those we have no mind to.

We ought, if we damn sins at all, to damn our own, if only for this reason, that we cannot properly understand the fall of those whose temptations we have never felt. The man who does not enjoy the captivating stimulant of a glass of port should be the very last to denounce the poor dipsomaniac. Burns is perfectly right in saying that “High exalted godly dames” who are “nae temptation” should refrain from giving bad names to their sisters who are. I try, even in the pulpit, where such reticence is particularly difficult, to avoid the fault condemned by the poets I have quoted. I think I may claim to be fairly successful, not because I am singularly virtuous but because I am not. There is hardly a sin which I need refrain from denouncing, for there are very few—at the moment I can only think of one—that “I have no mind to.”

Yet there is one. I have never in my life been tempted to issue a questionnaire. The fact that I am forced to use this word—there being no English equivalent—proves that the thing itself is of foreign origin and that the vice is not native with us. That the word has a secondary meaning among the French, “torturer,” shows what they think of it.

I do not, I can say honestly, understand the lure of this kind of wickedness. I trust that I shall not be accused of pharisaical self-righteousness when I say that if the devil came to me to-morrow and offered me the opportunity of asking my neighbours for written answers to lists of questions, I should not have the slightest difficulty in saying, “Retro, Satanas!” and should find a positive pleasure in flinging his sheets of foolscap back in his face. I do not want to torment other people in this particular way. But many men do; and the vice is becoming more prevalent. Every year, so it seems to me, more men fall victims to it, and once a man begins he cannot stop. As in the case of opium eaters, each indulgence results in increased craving, and the habit becomes confirmed perhaps beyond the hope of remedy.

If, like drink and dope, this vice were a private one, affecting only the victim, or at most his family and friends, I should have nothing to say about it. But the question-asker brings suffering into the lives of thousands of innocent and defenceless people while he himself thrives, often indeed being paid a salary for doing the thing that he ought to be sent to jail for. In a really well-regulated society he would be hanged. It seems to me a duty—I have no doubt at all that it is a pleasure—to utter a mild protest against this vice.

Often the sin is disguised, covered up with an excuse of some sort, so that it may not appear to be the hideous thing it is. The Income Tax collector, for instance, who issues annually one of the most puzzling of all lists of questions, pretends that he is simply engaged in collecting money. He does collect money, of course, and no doubt when he first began his work the collection of money was his sole object. He may even have wanted to collect it with the smallest amount of trouble and worry possible. But of late years he has fallen a victim to the question-asking habit and has taken to asking for information in a peremptory way. Nobody likes paying, of course, but I think that almost every man would rather pay a little more—say an extra five per cent on his assessment—than fill up the preliminary forms and answer all the questions which follow the return of these documents. The ingenuity displayed by the Inland Revenue officers in devising supplementary questions is a proof, if proof were needed, that these men are the victims of a morbid craving.

I once held possession of two small fields and therefore became, in the eyes of the Inland Revenue authorities, a farmer. As a farmer I made a careful return of my profits, which as a matter of fact were losses. I set down every quart of milk given by the cows which lived in the fields, every egg laid by the few hens which wandered about, and everything else, down to the smallest details, about those fields. I congratulated myself that my return was absolutely complete and question proof. I was over-confident. After a couple of days of meditation the collector asked me to state how many tons of coal I had dug up. He knew, and he knew that I knew, that no coal ever had been or ever could be dug up within a hundred miles of my two fields. He had no hope, cannot have had any hope, of making me pay a single penny on the profits of a private coal mine. He asked the question simply in order to tease; or, if that seems a harsh thing to say of any man, because he was the victim of a morbid craving.

I am not a highly paid worker, nor am I particularly diligent, but I am convinced that I could earn enough to pay an extra pound or so of Income Tax in the hours which I now spend solving the puzzles set me and answering the questions, like that about coal, which are put to me. There must be thousands of others in the same position. It is—it can only be—because the collection of revenue is a secondary consideration that the thing is done as it is. The fact is that many otherwise worthy civil servants have acquired the habit of asking questions simply for the pleasure of asking them and are the victims of an anti-social vice.

Generally the question-asker tries to excuse himself by saying that he is collecting statistics.

I do not know that the clergy suffer more than other people from being treated as the raw material of statistics. Doctors, I fancy, are in a worse case. Schoolmasters, and all who are connected with the management of schools, suffer severely. I have heard complaints from business men. Hardly anyone escapes. I only use the sufferings of the clergy because I know more about them than I do of any others.

There is a paper, of enormous size, sent annually to the clergy by the National Assembly of the Church of England. I have never actually counted the questions on it, but there must be many hundreds. Among them are nineteen concerned with the contributions made by each parish to a number of religious and charitable societies—nineteen societies with a question for each. Such information is of interest, and perhaps some value, to the parishes and societies concerned. It is of no value whatever to the National Church Assembly. But even if we suppose that the Assembly, out of idle curiosity, desires the information, or thinks it does, how easy it would be to take the reports of the nineteen societies and extract from them the figures that are wanted. Every contribution from every parish is acknowledged by these societies and could be taken from their reports with very little trouble, with perhaps one-fiftieth part of the labour involved by the thousands of separate forms sent in by the clergy. The figures so arrived at would have the further advantage of being correct, which under the present system—I judge by my own returns—they certainly are not.

If the Church Assembly simply wanted information that is the way it would get it. But it does not want information: it wants to indulge the craving for asking questions on sheets of paper and forcing innocent people to answer them. There is no other conceivable explanation of its action.

Of course, a pretence is made that the returns are required for the compilation of statistics. That is what is said to me and doubtless to hundreds of others when we do not fill up the forms. We are told that our negligent indolence is interfering with the compiling of a whole book of statistics. If we really prevented the compiling of statistics we ought to be given medals, or titles (ecclesiastical, of course), or otherwise suitably rewarded. For statistics are not merely useless—they are misleading, far more dangerously misleading even than the speeches of politicians or the advertisements of moneylenders.

This, I think, is indisputable. It has become a proverb that anything can be proved from statistics. A man of ordinary intelligence can, without the slightest difficulty, prove four or five pairs of contradictory propositions from any collection of statistics. When he has finished, another man, also of no more than ordinary intelligence, will easily prove that every one of the first man’s conclusions is wrong. It is far better, because less irritating and therefore less conducive to blasphemy, for a man to lose himself on a road with no sign-posts on it than on one beflagged with hundreds of sign-posts which all tell lies.

But the statistics excuse is no more than a pretence. Probably in the early stages of their disease those who issue questionnaires really believe that they are seeking information for statistical purposes. Later on they abandon the pretence and ask their questions merely for the sake of asking them, quite unashamed.

I was for twenty-one years subject to a bishop who asked me my name, on a printed form, every May. There was some excuse for him the first time, though even then he could have found out what he wanted to know, if he really did want to know it, in any clerical directory. The second and even the third time I tried, being a charitable man, to believe that he had forgotten my name, was too poor to buy a directory, and too friendless to be able to borrow one. But as years went on he and I came to know each other well. I often enjoyed his hospitality, dining agreeably in his house. He often dined in mine. We corresponded, and I signed every letter I ever wrote to him. He was a genial and friendly man, in many things quite sensible. Yet for nearly a quarter of a century he went on asking me to write my name down for him once every year. He did not want to know it. He made no pretence that he was going to embody it in a volume of statistics. He was simply an unfortunate victim of the habit of asking questions.

I used to wonder sometimes what would happen if I wrote down that my name was Sanders Sanderson or John Smith. Would he be surprised? Would he, with mild remonstrance, call my attention to an inaccuracy in my return? I fancy not. In all probability he never read a word I wrote for him, my name or anything else.

One does not, of course, play tricks of that kind on bishops. For the sake of their high office and estimable characters we respect them too much to be flippant with them. But I did try a similar experiment once on an Education Office.

It wanted to know the measurements of a schoolroom. The proper way of finding that out was to ask one of its own inspectors, who constantly visited the school and always wrote down its dimensions in a notebook. That, I suppose, did not occur to the clerk who issued the form of inquiry. He sent his question to me. I answered it. The next year he asked it again, and again I answered it. The third year the same question came to me. I was annoyed, and said that the room was the same size as before. This was a perfectly reasonable answer. Schoolrooms are not trees. They do not grow and nobody could have added a foot or cut a yard off that room without an inspector discovering the fact immediately. That answer was no use. The clerk, who kept his temper all the time, took no notice of it, and went on sending me copies of the question until at last I gave him figures.

But I did not give him the figures I had given him before. I doubled the dimensions of the schoolroom. He appeared to be perfectly satisfied. The next year I doubled them again. He expressed neither surprise nor misgiving. In the course of five or six years that schoolroom became a great deal larger than St. Paul’s. It was really, according to the figures I gave, an immense building, perhaps the largest in the world. Even a fourteen-year old office boy would, I thought, be struck by the existence of such a structure in a small village. But the education authority remained placidly indifferent. Then I suddenly reduced the size of the room, giving measurements which would have been small for a sentry-box. It would have been impossible to get three children, without a teacher, into that schoolroom. The education authority made no comment at all.

Why was that question asked? Why was an answer insisted upon? Clearly no use was ever made of the figures I returned. If statistics had been compiled from them and plotted into a graph the result would have been grotesque. The least intelligent official could not have failed to notice the existence of a schoolroom far bigger than the Albert Hall which shrank in the course of a year to the size of an American tourist’s trunk, if he had ever read my returns. There is no explanation of the asking of such questions except the one I have suggested. The men who ask them are “mentally deficient.” (The mention of educational authorities suggests this phrase, which is a favourite one of theirs.) They have reached this unhappy state by long indulgence in a seductive vice.

It is, I suppose, hopeless to appeal to the law for protection from the persecutions which quiet and peaceable people endure at the hands of question-askers. But something, if life is not to become intolerable, must be done. Year by year the number of these papers of questions increases. Year by year more of our time is wasted in writing answers. Year by year the nervous irritation consequent on wrestling with returns gets worse. Yet it is difficult to see what can be done. I have, as I have already confessed, tried the plan of giving totally incorrect and even grotesque answers. That is no use, for the questioner would just as soon have a wrong answer as a right one. I have tried the plan of saying, “See last year’s return,” when asked, for instance, for the inscription on a church bell which has remained unaltered for several centuries. That is no use. The questioner could get at the inscription in that way. But it is not the inscription he wants. I have tried putting the foolscap sheets of questions straight into the waste-paper basket and giving no answers at all. That is no use. The questioner pelts me with fresh sheets of foolscap, which is exhausting for the postman; takes to threatening me, which I do not in the least mind; he changes his tone and says he is sorry for troubling me, which I do not believe; finally defeats me by getting a bishop or an archdeacon to appeal to my better nature. Then I give in, wishing very much that I had not got a better nature.

The only remedy I can think of is to kill a few of the people who issue these forms. It would not, I think, be necessary to kill many. Perhaps five or six would be enough. The others, fearing the fate of their fellows, would be cowed into quiescence. Morally I think these executions would be as justifiable as the hanging of murderers, for we should be ridding society of pestilent nuisances.

The difficulty is that we cannot get at the right men to kill. To shoot the local Income Tax collector, for instance, would be unjust, and no good cause is ever helped by injustice. The poor fellow, whom we are greatly tempted to slay, is not responsible for the forms he issues. They come from someone who certainly ought to be killed, but cannot be found. It would, for the same reason, be wrong to plunge a dagger into the heart of a Rural Dean. I have often stood with a long carving-knife in my hand close behind the chair in which an unsuspecting Rural Dean was sitting, a man who, regardless of the laws of hospitality, had handed me a list of questions—handed it to me in my own house just before luncheon. A sense of public duty, rendered acute by a consciousness of private wrong, has prompted me to make an end of him then and there.

I have never done the deed yet, and do not think I ever shall. It is not the fear of consequences that holds me back. If I were hanged afterwards I should become one of the noble army of martyrs and win that posthumous glory inherited by those who die for the Church and humanity. I should like that. A feeling of pity for the Rural Dean, often an amiable and charming man with a wife and children depending on him, makes me hesitate. While I hesitate my resolution is “sicklied o’er” with the thought that, after all, it is not the Rural Dean’s fault. He may even hate the questions as much as I do. There is someone else, some anonymous criminal, who issues the questions to the Rural Dean. If I could get at that man I should—— But perhaps it would be better to try to cure him. That might be done if he were shut up in an asylum, like those provided for inebriates, and compelled to work for eight hours every day at a typewriter which had no note of interrogation on any of its keys.