master and his clerical assistant are both represented as being privy to the affair. They want this bullying to occur. Instead of exercising their own authority, they use these boys, who are Mr. Kipling's heroes, to punish the two victims. Head master and clergyman turn a deaf ear to the complaints of an indignant mother. All this Mr. Kipling represents as a most desirable state of affairs. In this we have the key to the ugliest, most retrogressive, and finally fatal idea of modern imperialism; the idea of a tacit conspiracy between the law and illegal violence. Just as the Tsardom wrecked itself at last by a furtive encouragement of the ruffians of the Black Hundreds, who massacred Jews and other people supposed to be inimical to the Tsar, so the good name of the British Imperial Government has been tainted—and is still tainted—by an illegal raid made by Doctor Jameson into the Transvaal before the Boer War, and by the adventures, which we shall presently describe, of Sir Edward Carson and Mr. F. E. Smith (now Lord Birkenhead) in Ireland. By such treasons against their subjects, empires destroy themselves. The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies and emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. So soon as a government departs from that standard, it ceases to be anything more than "the gang in possession," and its days are numbered.
It was just this dignity of government which the crude Darwinism and the Kiplingism of the later Victorian years were destroying. Competition and survival were accepted as the basal facts of life. "War is the natural state of nations," said a popular London men's weekly[1] the other day, with an air of repeating something universally known. "Peace is only the interval of rest and preparation between wars." In accordance with such ideas the growing boy was exhorted to be "loyal" to his school and contemptuous of other schools, "loyal" to his class against other classes, "loyal" to his nation and contemptuous and fierce towards other nations, "loyal" to the English-speaking peoples and contemptuous and hostile to the German or French-speaking. His instinct for brotherhood was narrowed and debased. The universal brotherhood of mankind was laughed to scorn. All life was bickering, he was taught; and yet
- ↑ Town Topics, November 26th, 1919.
