Palmerston, Socialism would be the cheek of gutter snipes; Imperialism
would be the intrusion of cads. But cads are not alone concerned.

Broadly, the phase in which the Victorian epoch closed was what can only
be called the Imperialist phase. Between that and us stands a very
individual artist who must nevertheless be connected with that phase. As
I said at the beginning, Macaulay (or, rather, the mind Macaulay shared
with most of his powerful middle class) remains as a sort of pavement or
flat foundation under all the Victorians. They discussed the dogmas
rather than denied them. Now one of the dogmas of Macaulay was the dogma
of progress. A fair statement of the truth in it is not really so hard.
Investigation of anything naturally takes some little time. It takes
some time to sort letters so as to find a letter: it takes some time to
test a gas-bracket so as to find the leak; it takes some time to sift
evidence so as to find the truth. Now the curse that fell on the later
Victorians was this: that they began to value the time more than the
truth. One felt so secretarial when sorting letters that one never found
the letter; one felt so scientific in explaining gas that one never
found the leak; and one felt so judicial, so impartial, in weighing
evidence that one had to be bribed to come to any conclusion at all.
This was the last note of the Victorians: procrastination was called
progress.

Now if we look for the worst fruits of this fallacy we shall find them
in historical criticism. There is a curious habit of treating any one
who comes before a strong movement as the "forerunner" of that movement.
That is, he is treated as a sort of slave running in advance of a great
army. Obviously, the analogy really arises from St. John the Baptist,
for whom the phrase "forerunner" was rather peculiarly invented. Equally
obviously, such a phrase only applies to an alleged or real divine