etorted that Englishmen certainly do not limit their
indignation to foreigners, and that the Marconi campaign is a proof
that a good Englishman can always become righteously indignant against
a bad Englishman--at least when the latter happens to be a Welshman or
a Jew. But the Marconi campaign was only another example of
group-indignation against persons who were outside the group. It was
not, in this instance, a national or Imperial group: it was a party
group. What I am arguing for is the direction of group-indignation,
not against outsiders, but when necessary against the members of the
group. I should like to see Conservatives becoming really indignant
about Conservative scandals, Liberals becoming really indignant about
Liberal scandals, Socialists becoming really indignant about Socialist
scandals. As it is, indignation is usually merely a form of sectarian
excitement It is always easy to find something about which to become
indignant in your political opponent, if it is only his good temper.
His crime of crimes is that he is your political opponent--you use his
minor crimes merely as rods to punish him for that. Our indignation
against our opponents, to say truth, is usually ready long before the
happy excuse comes which looses it like a wild beast into the arena.
One sees a good example of this leashed indignation in the Ulster
Unionist attitude to Nationalist Ireland. There is a silly scuffle
about flags at Castledawson between a Sunday-school excursion party
and a Hibernian procession, both of which ought to have known better.
Not a woman or child is injured, according to the verdict of a judge
on the bench, but the Ulster Unionists, armed to the teeth with
indignation in advance, denounce the affair as though it were on the
same level of villainy with the September Massacres. Not long
afterwards real outrages break out in Belfast, and Catholics and
Socialists are kicked and beaten within an inch of their lives. Here
was a test of the reality of the indignation against outrages on human
beings. Did the Ulstermen then come forward in a righteous fury
against the wrongdoers on their own side? Not a bit of it. Sir Edward
Carson did disown them in the House of Commons. But the Ulster
Unionists, as a whole, raised not a breath of indignation. Being
average human beings, indeed, they invariably retort to any charges
made against them with an angry _tu quoque_ to the South. It is not
long, for instance, since a Specia