Mill--on "Liberty"--gives the required opening: "Despotism is a
legitimate mode of government in dealing with Barbarians, provided the
end be their improvement"; or this from Shaw's preface to the Home Rule
edition of "John Bull's Other Island": "I am prepared to Steam-roll
Tibet if Tibet persist in refusing me my international rights." Now, it
is within our right to enforce a principle within our own territory, but
to force it on other people, called for the occasion "barbarians," is
quite another thing. Shaw may get wrathful, and genuinely so, over the
Denshawai horror, and expose it nakedly and vividly as he did in his
first edition of "John Bull's Other Island," Preface for Politicians;
but the aggressors are undisturbed as long as he gives them pretexts
with his "steam-roll Tibet" phrase. And when he says further that he is
prepared to co-operate with France, Italy, Russia, Germany and England
in Morocco, Tripoli, Siberia and Africa to civilise these places, not
only are his denunciations of Denshawai horrors of no avail--except to
draw tears after the event--but he cannot co-operate in the civilising
process without practising the cruelty; and perhaps in their privacy the
empire-makers may smile when Shaw writes of Empire with evident
earnestness as "a name that every man who has ever felt the sacredness
of his own native soil to him, and thus learnt to regard that feeling in
other men as something holy and inviolable, spits out of his mouth with
enormous contempt." When, further, in his "Representative Government"
Mill tells the English people--a thing about which Shaw has no
illusions--that they are "the power which of all in existence best
understands liberty, and, whatever may have been its errors in the past,
has attained to more of conscience and moral principle in its dealing
with foreigners than any other great nation seems either to conceive as
possible or recognise as desirable"--they not only go forward to
civilise the barbarians by Denshawai horrors, but they do so unctuously
in the true Macaulayan style. We feel a natural wrath at all this, not