t be the
fittest; that the weakest must go to the wall, and that any one he could
not understand must be the weakest; that was the philosophy which
he lumberingly believed through life, like many another agnostic old
bachelor of the Victorian era. All his views on religion (reverently
quoted in the Review of Reviews) were simply the stalest ideas of his
time. It was not his fault, poor fellow, that he called a high hill
somewhere in South Africa "his church." It was not his fault, I mean,
that he could not see that a church all to oneself is not a church at
all. It is a madman's cell. It was not his fault that he "figured out
that God meant as much of the planet to be Anglo-Saxon as possible."
Many evolutionists much wiser had "figured out" things even more
babyish. He was an honest and humble recipient of the plodding popular
science of his time; he spread no ideas that any cockney clerk in
Streatham could not have spread for him. But it was exactly because he
had no ideas to spread that he invoked slaughter, violated justice, and
ruined republics to spread them.

But the case is even stronger and stranger. Fashionable Imperialism not
only has no ideas of its own to extend; but such ideas as it has are
actually borrowed from the brown and black peoples to whom it seeks to
extend them. The Crusading kings and knights might be represented
as seeking to spread Western ideas in the East. But all that our
Imperialist aristocrats could do would be to spread Eastern ideas in the
East. For that very governing class which urges Occidental Imperialism
has been deeply discoloured with Oriental mysticism and Cosmology.

The same society lady who expects the Hindoos to accept her view of
politics has herself accepted their view of religion. She wants first
to steal their earth, and then to share their heaven. The same Imperial
cynic who wishes the Turks to submit to English science has himself
submitted to Turkish philosophy, to a wholly Turkish view of despotism
and destiny.

There is an obvious and amusing proof of this in a recent life of
Rhodes. The writer admits with proper Imperial gloom the fact that
Africa is still chiefly inhabited by Africans. He suggests Rhodes in
the South confronting savages and Kitchener in the North facing Turks,
Arabs, and Soudanese, and then he quotes this remark of Cecil Rhodes:
"It is inevitable fate that all this should be changed; and I should
like to be the agent of fate." That was Cecil Rh