As a rule they are well composed. For instance, a royal commission on water supply would probably comprise two or three members of Parliament of some standing, the President of the Institute of Civil Engineers, a professor of sanitation, a canal expert, one or two trade unionists, one or two manufacturers, and a representative of the Home Office or the Board of Trade. Any man of position who has shown interest in public affairs may be asked to sit on a royal commission ... provided he is not a novelist. Only one novelist has attained so giddy a height: Sir Rider Haggard; how it happened is not known: it must have been a mistake. We are not weighty enough, serious enough to be called on, even if our novels are so weighty and so serious that hardly anybody can read them. We are a gay tribe of Ariels, too light to discuss even our own trade. For royal commissions concern themselves with our trade, with copyright law, with the restrictions of the paper supply. You might think that, for instance, paper supply concerned us, for we use cruel quantities, yet no recognised author sat on the commission; a publisher was the nearest approach. Apparently there were two great consumers of paper, authors and grocers, but alone the grocers were consulted. What is the matter with us? Is our crime that we put down in indecent ink what we think and feel, while other people think and feel the same, but prudently keep it down? Possibly our crimes are our imagination and our tendency to carry this imagination into action. Bismarck said that a State conducted on the lines of the Sermon on the Mount would not last twenty-four hours; perhaps it is thought that a State in the conduct of which a novelist had a share would immediately resolve itself into a problem play. Something like that, though in fact it is unlikely that Ariel come to judgment would be much more fanciful in his decrees than the historic Solomon.