Page:Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.djvu/361

Rh Bank of England, at three o'clock in the afternoon, making it difficult to pass, as well as dangerous to one's pocket.

On another occasion, at two o'clock, a German band was playing in Piccadilly, at that crowded part, the Circus. In both instances the police were looking on, and seemed to enjoy the music they were not directed to stop.

I have obtained, in my own country, an unenviable celebrity, not by anything I have done, but simply by a determined resistance to the tyranny of the lowest mob, whose love, not of music, but of the most discordant noises, is so great that it insists upon enjoying it at all hours and in every street. It may therefore be expected that I should in this volume state at least the outline of my own case.

I claim no merit for this resistance; although I am quite aware that I am fighting the battle of every one of my countrymen who gains his subsistence by his intellectual labour. The simple reason for the course I have taken is, that however disagreeable it has been, it would have been still more painful to have given up a great and cherished object, already fully within my reach. I have been compelled individually to resist this tyranny of the lowest mob, because the Government itself is notoriously afraid to face it.

On a careful retrospect of the last dozen years of my life, I have arrived at the conclusion that I speak within limit when I state that one-fourth part of my working power has been destroyed by the nuisance against which I have protested. Twenty-five per cent, is rather too large an additional income-tax upon the brain of the intellectual workers of this country, to be levied by permission of the Government, and squandered upon its most worthless classes.

The effect of a uniform and continuous sound, in distracting the attention or in disturbing intellectual pursuits, is almost