Thursday, November 10, 2022
We Live in an Armed Camp
G.K. Chesterton, "A Defence of Detective Stories," The Defendant (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1902), pp. 118-123 (at 122-123):
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There is, however, another good work that is done by detective stories. While it is the constant tendency of the Old Adam to rebel against so universal and automatic a thing as civilization, to preach departure and rebellion, the romance of police activity keeps in some sense before the mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions. By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but the traitors within our gates.
