From a favorite early 20th-century blockbuster by John Buchan, The Power-House:
As I dived into the recesses of my memory I heard his voice asking if I were not a lawyer.
I told him, Yes. A barrister with a fair common-law practice and some work in Privy Council appeals.
He asked me why I chose the profession.
“It came handiest,” I said. “I am a dry creature, who loves facts and logic. I am not a flier, I have no new ideas, I don’t want to lead men, and I like work. I am the ordinary educated Englishman, and my sort gravitates to the Bar. We like feeling that, if we are not the builders, at any rate we are the cement of civilisation.”
He repeated the words “cement of civilisation” in his soft voice.
“In a sense you are right. But civilisation needs more than the law to hold it together. You see, all mankind are not equally willing to accept as divine justice what is called human law.”
“Of course there are further sanctions,” I said. “Police and armies and the goodwill of civilisation.”
He caught me up quickly. “The last is your true cement. Did you ever reflect, Mr Leithen, how precarious is the tenure of the civilisation we boast about?”
“I should have thought it fairly substantial,” I said, “and the foundations grow daily firmer.”
He laughed. “That is the lawyer’s view, but, believe me, you are wrong. Reflect, and you will find that the foundations are sand. You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.”
It was the kind of paradoxical, undergraduate speculation which grown men indulge in sometimes after dinner. I looked at my host to discover his mood, and at the moment a log flared up again.
His face was perfectly serious. His light wild eyes were intently watching me.
“Take one little instance,” he said. “We are a commercial world, and have built up a great system of credit. Without our cheques and bills of exchange and currency the whole of our life would stop. But credit only exists because behind it we have a standard of value. My Bank of England notes are worthless paper unless I can get sovereigns for them if I choose. Forgive this elementary disquisition, but the point is important. We have fixed a gold standard, because gold is sufficiently rare, and because it allows itself to be coined into a portable form. I am aware that there are economists who say that the world could be run equally well on a pure credit basis, with no metal currency at the back of it; but, however sound their argument may be in the abstract, the thing is practically impossible. You would have to convert the whole of the world’s stupidity to their economic faith before it would work.
her first Specialty Pistols experience. Many of them had extended-eye-relief scopes. However, those pistols had relatively sharp recoil (.308 Win and 7-30 Waters, respectively) and the EER scopes make hitting boomers quite difficult without some practice. Unwisely, I focused on the idea that Squeaky wanted to hit her boomers, so I picked the heaviest .223 pistol I had, on the Bower rest for easy accuracy, and with a regular short-eye-relief. LARGE rifle scope for big field-of-view. (It’s the second from the bottom in the pic at right.)
