tragedy. Such a temper
of mind may, at the first touch of resistance, transform your stolid,
laudable, laughable Englishman into the beastliest of tyrants. It may
drive him into a delirium of cruelty and injustice. It may sweep away,
in one ruin of war, wealth, culture, and the whole fabric of
civilisation. It may darken counsel, and corrupt thought. In fact, it
may give you something very like the history of the English in Ireland.
Now it is not denied that most Englishmen believe the English mind to be
incapable of such excesses. This, they say, is the Russian in Warsaw,
the Austrian in Budapest, the Belgian in the Congo, the blind fool-fury
of the Seine. But it is not the English way. Nor is it suggested that
this illusion is sheer and mere hypocrisy. It is simply an hallucination
of jingoism. Take a trivial instance in point. We have all read in the
newspapers derisive accounts of disorderly scenes in the French Chamber
or the Austrian Reichstag; we all know the complacent sigh with which
England is wont on such occasions to thank God that she is not as one
of those. Does anybody think that this attitude will be at all modified
by recent occurrences at Westminster? By no means. Lord Hugh Cecil, his
gibbering and gesticulating quite forgotten, will be assuring the House
next year that the Irish are so deficient in self-restraint as to be
unfit for Home Rule. Mr Smith will be deploring that intolerant temper
which always impels a Nationalist to shout down, and not to argue down
an opponent. Mr Walter Long will be vindicating the cause of law and
order in one sentence, and inciting "Ulster" to bloodshed in the next.
This is not hypocrisy, it is genius. It is also, by the way, the genesis
of the Irish Question. If anyone is disposed to underrate the mad
passions of which race hatred can slip the leash, let him recall the
crucial examples which we have had in our own time. We have in our own
time seen Great Britain inflamed by two frenzies--against France, and
against the Boer Republics. In the history of public opinion there are
no two chapters more discreditable. In the days of Fashoda the Frenchman
was a degenerate _tigre-singe,_ the sworn enemy of religion and soap. He
had contributed nothing to civilisation except a loathsome science of
sensuality, and the taint of decay was in his bones. In the days of
Spion Kop the Boer was an unlaundered savage, fit only to be a target
for pig-stickers. His ignorance seemed the mo