We've worked for backbone.We brag about backbone, and if the joints are anchylosed so much the better.We're still but only half awake to our error.You can't change that suddenly.""Turn it round and make it go backwards," interjected Thorns.
"It's trying to do that," I said, "in places."And afterwards Crupp declared I had begotten a nightmare which haunted him of nights; he was trying desperately and belatedly to blow a brain as one blows soap-bubbles on such a mezoroic saurian as I had conjured up, while the clumsy monster's fate, all teeth and brains, crept nearer and nearer....
I've grown, I think, since those days out of the urgency of that apprehension.I still think a European war, and conceivably a very humiliating war for England, may occur at no very distant date, but I do not think there is any such heroic quality in our governing class as will make that war catastrophic.The prevailing spirit in English life--it is one of the essential secrets of our imperial endurance--is one of underbred aggression in prosperity and diplomatic compromise in moments of danger; we bully haughtily where we can and assimilate where we must.It is not for nothing that our upper and middle-class youth is educated by teachers of the highest character, scholars and gentlemen, men who can pretend quite honestly that Darwinism hasn't upset the historical fall of man, that cricket is moral training, and that Socialism is an outrage upon the teachings of Christ.A sort of dignified dexterity of evasion is the national reward.Germany, with a larger population, a vigorous and irreconcilable proletariat, a bolder intellectual training, a harsher spirit, can scarcely fail to drive us at last to a realisation of intolerable strain.So we may never fight at all.
The war of preparations that has been going on for thirty years may end like a sham-fight at last in an umpire's decision.We shall proudly but very firmly take the second place.For my own part, since I love England as much as I detest her present lethargy of soul, I pray for a chastening war--I wouldn't mind her flag in the dirt if only her spirit would come out of it.So I was able to shake off that earlier fear of some final and irrevocable destruction truncating all my schemes.At the most, a European war would be a dramatic episode in the reconstruction I had in view.
In India, too, I no longer foresee, as once I was inclined to see, disaster.The English rule in India is surely one of the most extraordinary accidents that has ever happened in history.We are there like a man who has fallen off a ladder on to the neck of an elephant, and doesn't know what to do or how to get down.Until something happens he remains.Our functions in India are absurd.
We English do not own that country, do not even rule it.We make nothing happen; at the most we prevent things happening.We suppress our own literature there.Most English people cannot even go to this land they possess; the authorities would prevent it.If Messrs.Perowne or Cook organised a cheap tour of Manchester operatives, it would be stopped.No one dare bring the average English voter face to face with the reality of India, or let the Indian native have a glimpse of the English voter.In my time Ihave talked to English statesmen, Indian officials and ex-officials, viceroys, soldiers, every one who might be supposed to know what India signifies, and I have prayed them to tell me what they thought we were up to there.I am not writing without my book in these matters.And beyond a phrase or so about "even-handed justice"--and look at our sedition trials!--they told me nothing.Time after time I have heard of that apocryphal native ruler in the north-west, who, when asked what would happen if we left India, replied that in a week his men would be in the saddle, and in six months not a rupee nor a virgin would he left in Lower Bengal.That is always given as our conclusive justification.But is it our business to preserve the rupees and virgins of Lower Bengal in a sort of magic inconclusiveness? Better plunder than paralysis, better fire and sword than futility.Our flag is spread over the peninsula, without plans, without intentions--a vast preventive.The sum total of our policy is to arrest any discussion, any conferences that would enable the Indians to work out a tolerable scheme of the future for themselves.But that does not arrest the resentment of men held back from life.Consider what it must be for the educated Indian sitting at the feast of contemporary possibilities with his mouth gagged and his hands bound behind him! The spirit of insurrection breaks out in spite of espionage and seizures.Our conflict for inaction develops stupendous absurdities.The other day the British Empire was taking off and examining printed cotton stomach wraps for seditious emblems and inscriptions....
In some manner we shall have to come out of India.We have had our chance, and we have demonstrated nothing but the appalling dulness of our national imagination.We are not good enough to do anything with India.Codger and Flack, and Gates and Dayton, Cladingbowl in the club, and the HOME CHURCHMAN in the home, cant about "character," worship of strenuous force and contempt of truth; for the sake of such men and things as these, we must abandon in fact, if not in appearance, that empty domination.Had we great schools and a powerful teaching, could we boast great men, had we the spirit of truth and creation in our lives, then indeed it might be different.But a race that bears a sceptre must carry gifts to justify it.
