achful words to utter about the campaign in
South Africa. I propose to take those words out of his mouth. I will
have nothing to do with the fatuous front-bench pretensions that our
governors always govern well, that our statesmen are never whitewashed
and never in need of whitewash. The only moral superiority I claim is
that of not defending the indefensible. I most earnestly urge my
countrymen not to hide behind thin official excuses, which the sister
kingdoms and the subject races can easily see through. We can confess
that our crimes have been as mountains, and still not be afraid of the
present comparison. There may be, in the eyes of some, a risk in
dwelling in this dark hour on our failures in the past: I believe
profoundly that the risk is all the other way. I believe that the most
deadly danger to our arms to-day lies in any whiff of that self-praise,
any flavour of that moral cowardice, any glimpse of that impudent and
ultimate impenitence, that may make one Boer or Scot or Welshman or
Irishman or Indian feel that he is only smoothing the path for a second
Prussia. I have passed the great part of my life in criticising and
condemning the existing rulers and institutions of my country: I think
it is infinitely the most patriotic thing that a man can do. I have no
illusions either about our past or our present. _I_ think our whole
history in Ireland has been a vulgar and ignorant hatred of the
crucifix, expressed by a crucifixion. I think the South African War was
a dirty work which we did under the whips of moneylenders. I think
Mitchelstown was a disgrace; I think Denshawi was a devilry.

Yet there is one part of life and history in which I would assert the
absolute spotlessness of England. In one department we wear a robe of
white and a halo of innocence. Long and weary as may be the records of
our wickedness, in one direction we have done nothing but good. Whoever
we may have wronged, we have never wronged Germany. Again and again we
have dragged her from under the just vengeance of her enemies, from the
holy anger of Maria Teresa, from the impatient and contemptuous common
sense of Napoleon. We have kept a ring fence around the Germans while
they sacked Denmark and dismembered France. And if we had served our God
as we have served _their_ kings, there would not be to-day one remnant
of them in our path, either to slander or to slay us.

IX--_The Awakening of England_

In October 1912 silent and seem