Yet the idea of the sacred city is not only the
link of them both, it is the only serious justification and the only
serious corrective of them both. If politeness means too often a mere
frippery, it is because it has not enough to do with serious patriotism
and public dignity; if policemen are coarse or casual, it is because
they are not sufficiently convinced that they are the servants of the
beautiful city and the agents of sweetness and light. Politeness is not
really a frippery. Politeness is not really even a thing merely suave
and deprecating. Politeness is an armed guard, stern and splendid and
vigilant, watching over all the ways of men; in other words, politeness
is a policeman. A policeman is not merely a heavy man with a truncheon:
a policeman is a machine for the smoothing and sweetening of the
accidents of everyday existence. In other words, a policeman is
politeness; a veiled image of politeness--sometimes impenetrably veiled.
But my point is here that by losing the original idea of the city, which
is the force and youth of both the words, both the things actually
degenerate. Our politeness loses all manliness because we forget that
politeness is only the Greek for patriotism.
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