t Succession," he would be a Sentimentalist
of a grosser and more improbable kind.

This is the essence of the Sentimentalist: that he seeks to enjoy every
idea without its sequence, and every pleasure without its consequence.

Now it would really be hard to find a worse case of this inconsequent
sentimentalism than the theory of the British Empire advanced by Mr.
Roosevelt himself in his attack on Sentimentalists. For the Imperial
theory, the Roosevelt and Kipling theory, of our relation to Eastern
races is simply one of eating the Oriental cake (I suppose a Sultana
Cake) and at the same time leaving it alone.

Now there are two sane attitudes of a European statesman towards Eastern
peoples, and there are only two.

First, he may simply say that the less we have to do with them the
better; that whether they are lower than us or higher they are so
catastrophically different that the more we go our way and they go
theirs the better for all parties concerned. I will confess to some
tenderness for this view. There is much to be said for letting that calm
immemorial life of slave and sultan, temple and palm tree flow on as it
has always flowed. The best reason of all, the reason that affects me
most finally, is that if we left the rest of the world alone we might
have some time for attending to our own affairs, which are urgent to
the point of excruciation. All history points to this; that intensive
cultivation in the long run triumphs over the widest extensive
cultivation; or, in other words, that making one's own field superior is
far more effective than reducing other people's fields to inferiority.
If you cultivate your own garden and grow a specially large cabbage,
people will probably come to see it. Whereas the life of one selling
small cabbages round the whole district is often forlorn.

Now, the Imperial Pioneer is essentially a commercial traveller; and
a commercial traveller is essentially a person who goes to see people
because they don't want to see him. As long as empires go about urging
their ideas on others, I always have a notion that the ideas are no
good. If they were really so splendid, they would make the country
preaching them a wonder of the world. That is the true ideal; a great
nation ought not to be a hammer, but a magnet. Men went to the mediaeval
Sorbonne because it was worth going to. Men went to old Japan because
only there could they find the unique and exquisite old Japanese art.
Nobody