sensitive to the rights and the charms of others, is in grave danger of
futility. Either he will become a dilettante, which is the French way,
or he will take to drink and mystical nihilism, a career very popular in
Russian fiction. Bad manners have indeed a distinct ethical value. We
all experience moods in which we politely assent to the thing that is
not, because of the fatigue of fighting for the thing that is. A
temperament such as has been delineated is therefore, as human types go,
an excellent type. But it has its peculiar perils. To ignore the point
of view of those in whose country you eat, drink, sleep, and sight-see
may breed only minor discords, and after all you will pay for your
manners in your bill. But to ignore the point of view of those whose
country you govern may let loose a red torrent of tragedy. Such a temper
of mind may, at the first touch of resistance, transform your stolid,
laudable, laughable Englishman into the beastliest of tyrants. It may
drive him into a delirium of cruelty and injustice. It may sweep away,
in one ruin of war, wealth, culture, and the whole fabric of
civilisation. It may darken counsel, and corrupt thought. In fact, it
may give you something very like the history of the English in Ireland.
Now it is not denied that most Englishmen believe the English mind to be
incapable of such excesses. This, they say, is the Russian in Warsaw,
the Austrian in Budapest, the Belgian in the Congo, the blind fool-fury
of the Seine. But it is not the English way. Nor is it suggested that
this illusion is sheer and mere hypocrisy. It is simply an hallucination
of jingoism. Take a trivial instance in point. We have all read in the
newspapers derisive accounts of disorderly scenes in the French Chamber
or the Austrian Reichstag; we all know the complacent sigh with which
England is wont on such occasions to thank God that she is not as one
of those. Does anybody think that this attitude will be at all modified
by recent occurrences at Westminster? By no means. Lord Hugh Cecil, his
gibbering and gesticulating quite forgotten, will be assuring the House