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as one type of urban Englishman, and the fact that they are white or brown, and live in Moscow or Timbuctoo, has nothing to do with the case. The effect of this fallacy can only be disastrous. It is conspicuous, to begin with, in the attitude of a section of Englishmen to native administration throughout the Empire. In Natal these dogmatists libel the doings of the Colonial Government which has to face the responsibility. Knowing nothing of the native mind, they imagine it a reflex of the familiar bourgeois article at home. A stern policy towards a recalcitrant tribe is conceived as if it were the tyranny of a bureaucrat over a respectable suburb. They dismiss a tale of treachery and wrongdoing as inconceivable, because it is not the kind of thing they are accustomed to themselves. In India, in a spirit of ignorant generosity, they declare for equal privileges for white and brown. Assuming all mankind to be of their type, they cannot conceive why a method of free government, which works well enough among themselves, should not be universal. Differences in race and caste and creed seem to them only the invention of denationalised Britons. "Trust the people," they cry, "give them a large and generous and liberal government, and see if all does not go well." It is ill playing with fire, and we decline the experiment as too costly. If Pascal is right and on ne voit rien de juste ou d'injuste qui ne change de

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qualité en changeant de climat,” surely the same is true of these less august counters, liberalism and generosity. But the Cockney mind is incapable of envisaging strange conditions of life. It is full of minor fancy, but is wholly lacking in any strong and masculine imagination. It is averse from facts, and resents an appeal to them as if it were an appeal to prejudice. The attitude is only too familiar to students of our history. It has broken the hearts and obscured the fame of many great servants of the State, for there are moments when for our sins the Cockney is the interpreter of the British people.

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Take again his attitude towards foreign affairs. The true Cockney is amazingly ignorant of the life of other nations, though he professes a patronising affection for them, especially if they happen to be at variance with his own. is the type of Englishman who is truly insular, and in all innocence grates the nerves of foreign observers. He cannot understand the conflict of nations save as a rivalry in the arts of peace. Since he does not want to sack his neighbour's house, he cannot believe that any foreign State can harbour such ambitions. When he is told of foreign preparations he declares (a) that they are untrue and the fictions of scaremongers, (b) that they are exaggerated, (c) that they are quite natural and legitimate and mean no offence to anybody. In his own business he is shrewd enough, but he is

quite willing to credit a great it is the only kind of right Power with the folly of spend- which international theory ing many millions on arma- knows. This is no argument ments for fun. Every foreign against idealism in welt-politik. profession of goodwill he wel- An enlightened public opinion comes as final, though he would may in time cure the disbe the last man to accept the position to acts of violence, same assurances from a trade but it is idle not to recognise competitor. The truth is that that at present in the psycholhe cannot grasp the meaning ogy of States that disposition of nationality. To him it is an is dominant. A Power which abstraction, like the Hegelian is strong enough can set all Infinite, and he cannot trans- codes, legal and ethical, at late it into everyday terms. defiance, without necessarily He thinks that a foreign na- doing itself any harm or action is simply one type of counting to any earthly tribforeigner multiplied. An in- unal. The true law of nations, dividual German is not a bad as the world is now constifellow; therefore the German tuted, is not, as is sometimes nation is no more inclined for said, the law of the beasts; war than he would be for the nor is it, strictly speaking, robbing of his neighbour's hen- the law of savages: but rather In consequence he can- the law of those clear-headed, not understand the oldest of all far seeing, unemotional, and the truths of history-that in selfish statesmen whom Machiinternational relations the rules avelli has sketched in his of private morality do not al-Prince' ways apply. A State is not a governors. moral personality in the same sense as the individual, and the man who denies this is ignorant of the first fact of politics. However amiable and highly civilised the component parts of a nation may be, the nation as a whole stands towards other nations as primitive man stood towards his fellows. There is no law Sovereign between States, however we may disguise the fact, because there is no higher power capable of enforcing its mandates. Any nation which is sufficiently powerful can secure the world's assent to what in private life would be injustice, and can give it a pious name. Might may be often bad policy, but

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But to the Cockney the nation is only the citizen writ large, and he assumes the citizen, and therefore the nation, to be of his own way of thinking.

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History teaches him no lessons. He declares confidently that this or that Power can never be our enemy, though the story of Europe is strewn with sudden and unlooked for oppositions. He urges us to look at the trend of opinion and the declarations of statesmen, as if opinion never changed and solemn public assurances were never cancelled. And at the same time, on another side, he is eager to urge on the Government a policy of active inter

ference. His fancy is quickly well the consequences; but in

touched, his emotions easily awakened, and the cause of some Balkan statelet or some unfortunate subject race sets him blustering against the world. It is all very curious: for on the one hand he laughs at the possible interference of our neighbours with our own business, while he joyfully dictates to the said neighbours on theirs. In all honesty and innocence he would plunge us into wars while stoutly protesting against any increased defences. The defect is one of intellect. A mind limited, but gloriously unconscious of its limitations, is astray in a sphere where these limitations are most cruelly apparent. A creature of phrases is brought up sharp against the stern realities of life.

In the matter of war we can observe the same fallacy. To the Cockney that world of elemental furies is so far from the range of his experience and his imagination that he cannot comprehend it. He hates it by instinct, because he feels its strangeness. Now war must be abhorrent to every serious man, but the grounds of this horror are important. It is properly hateful because of its misery and waste; it is defensible only as a grave necessity. the alternative to the sacrifice of higher things than human life and human comfort. The man who will most sincerely shrink from war is the man who is most in earnest about it. Such a one will not lightly take up the sword, knowing

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the last resort he sees that there is no other arbitrament. The Cockney temperament cannot take the thing seriously. "I hate war," said a famous Frenchwoman; "it spoils good talk." And to those who hold good talk the most vital thing on earth war is eternally unjustifiable. The profound moral issues of international strife are obscured for them, for they see only the little discomforts. Hence, while ardent preachers of peace, they are the most potent agents in the promotion of war. Questions of defence seem to them always a little fantastic. Being without the larger imagination, they cannot realise a condition of things which has no parallel in their daily life. They will always postpone a measure of defence to some measure of social experiment, because in their language the one is vital and clamorous and the other can wait. They shrilly oppose what they call "scare-mongering," which is in nine cases out of ten a common-sense policy for ensuring safety. And all the while they are amusing themselves with Peace Congresses and Peace orations and missions of parsons, journalists, and workmen to foreign capitals; as if the Destinies were likely to wait upon their social experiments and their easy sacrifices at forsaken shrines. To adapt Mr Roosevelt's image, they are like the woman who in a street fight weeps and clasps her husband's knees. They do not prevent the fight,

but they do their best to make and the discipline which it certain that their own side shall be badly beaten.

To turn to still another aspect, we find the Cockney temperament exhibited in its attitude towards Empire. "Little Englander" is one of the most accurate popular terms of reproach ever invented. Geographical extension seems to one class of mind not only valueless, but actively maleficent. They have that terror of space in which scientists find one of the signs of degeneration. Great distances and wide areas offend their decent urban souls, just as the cit of Mr Evelyn's day was affrighted by the steeps of Helvellyn. Their spirits long for trim streets, little houses in gardens, and at the most a parterre Nature, well-disciplined and humanised. They are ready, of course, with arguments to justify this aversion. It was little Nazareth, little Athens, little England, they say, which gave the great things to the world. They preach, truly but irrelevantly, the sentiment of heme and the small local affections which cling closest to a man's heart. Their ideal is a kind of citystate, a suburb within a ringfence, where policy can be reduced to the shortest of formulas. We have no space to analyse the constituents of this point of view, which includes the old-fashioned suspicion of delegated power, the conviction that change of latitude involves some deterioration in morals, a distaste for high and serious endeavour

entails. We will confine ourselves to its general aspect as the cult of small things. With much of its argument all must agree. A thin cosmopolitanism is no substitute for the local affections, and in the long-run it is to the small things that a man's loyalty most strongly adheres. But this is no reason why there should not be a positive value in the larger area and the bigger task, nor why loyalty to a parish should preclude loyalty to a nation or to an Empire. The main political truth which the twentieth century is likely to enforce is that the racial unit has taken the place of the geographical; and this involves a spacial extension. Largeness in itself is nothing: largeness misused is a curse: but largeness seriously accepted is a condition of greatness. An Empire muddled is far worse than a badly governed township; but an Empire wisely administered is greater than a small Republic, in the same way that an epic is a greater poetic achievement than a quatrain. There is no argument against Empire save the danger of failure, and for serious men this is no argument. But to the temperament we are speaking of size is a thing hateful in itself, and high ambitions are uncomfortable. Its possessors are full of irrelevant parallels with Rome and Spain, irrelevant because the men who use them are wholly without any true historical sense. They imagine that the defects of their vision and the limitations of their

philosophy are in themselves virtues, and condemn whatever is untainted with their own frailties.

Let us take as our final instance their attitude to social questions. The Cockney is, as a rule, a member of the middle classes and a zealous propagandist of his own culture. He sees below him the vast army of the poor, and, being the best of fellows, he is anxious to help. But once But once more his narrowness of outlook and poverty of imagination bar his way. To him the life of the poor is one of unrelieved misery. The absence of certain comforts, the lack of his own amenities of life, seem to him scarcely endurable deprivations. He labours, therefore, to impose upon the poor the middle-class standards of civilisation. He would educate their children in the middleclass way and impose on their lives his own conceptions of decency and order. Every working - man, if he had his will, should be a follower of Mr Samuel Smiles, his household conducted under a thousand rules, and his feet treading solidly in the straight path from the cradle to the grave. It is strange that men who in their own lives are very sensible of the value of distraction, should not see that there is a thing more unbearable than squalor to wit, dulness. The existence laid down for the poor by their middle-class reformers would drive the bulk of them to suicide or emigration in a twelvemonth. It is forgotten that the poor have a

civilisation of their own, different from that of the bourgeoisie, but no whit inferior. It is even arguable that in the matter of civic value theirs is the better. Like a true aristocracy they are a spending class, hazarding themselves and their fortunes in a cheerful gamble with life. If they lack certain obvious refinements, they have their share in the more masculine virtues of courage, sacrifice, and endurance. Any one who is familiar at firsthand with the life of the poor knows that the Cockney idea of the masses, living a life of unfeatured dreariness and filled with a passionate envy of those above them, is ludicrously untrue. The poor man is jealous of his own civilisation; he is above all things jealous of his freedom; but he is not jealous of his so-called betters. Their life seems to him prosaic and cabined and unendurable. He wants scope and liberty and better chances, but he does not want the old clothes of the middle-class. The Cockney by the nature of things can know nothing about the realities of the poor man's life. He can only imagine, and since his imagination is clipped at the best, he is bound to make a bad job of it. He reflects his own mind into an alien sphere and makes a false deduction. The outlander, on the other hand, is by the nature of things a better authority. In his daily life he comes in contact with the mind of the poor and learns to respect it. If such a man dabbles in politics he will be a reformer, but a

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