Over at City Journal, our perturbed doctor explains the chaos and disorder currently reigning in English cities by referencing the premise of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.

I confess that when I look at the people rioting, the youngish men, I feel almost as if they were of a different species from myself. They seem brutish, their faces bone and bristle. Their ugliness, however, is not biological or hereditary; it is an ugliness of soul, an antinomian ugliness.