at the abuses of the early Victorian period no longer exist
except as amusing pages in the novels of Dickens. But the moment we
look for a reform due to character and not to money, to statesmanship
and not to interest or mutiny, we are disillusioned. For example, we
remembered the maladministration and incompetence revealed by the
Crimean War as part of a bygone state of things until the South African
war shewed that the nation and the War Office, like those poor Bourbons
who have been so impudently blamed for a universal characteristic, had
learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. We had hardly recovered from the
fruitless irritation of this discovery when it transpired that the
officers' mess of our most select regiment included a flogging club
presided over by the senior subaltern. The disclosure provoked some
disgust at the details of this schoolboyish debauchery, but no surprise
at the apparent absence of any conception of manly honor and virtue, of
personal courage and self-respect, in the front rank of our chivalry.
In civil affairs we had assumed that the sycophancy and idolatry which
encouraged Charles I. to undervalue the Puritan revolt of the XVII
century had been long outgrown; but it has needed nothing but favorable
circumstances to revive, with added abjectness to compensate for its
lost piety. We have relapsed into disputes about transubstantiation at
the very moment when the discovery of the wide prevalence of theophagy
as a tribal custom has deprived us of the last excuse for believing that
our official religious rites differ in essentials from those of
barbarians. The Christian doctrine of the uselessness of punishment and
the wickedness of revenge has not, in spite of its simple common sense,
found a single convert among the nations: Christianity means nothing to
the masses but a sensational public execution which is made an excuse
for other executions. In its name we take ten years of a thief's life
minute by minute in the slow misery and degradation of modern reformed
imprisonment with as little remorse as Laud and his Star Chamber clipped
the ears of Bastwick and Burton. We dug up and mutilated the remains of
the Mahdi the other day exactly as we dug up and mutilated the remains
of Cromwell two centuries ago. We have demanded the decapitation of the
Chinese Boxer princes as any Tartar would have done; and our military
and naval expeditions to kill, burn, and destroy tribes and villages for
kno