at is its fuel.

Loss of manhood or perpetual rancour--those are the penalties imposed on
the soul of a subject race. Nor does the dominant race escape scot free.
Far from it. On the whole, it suffers a deeper degradation. A dominant
race, like a domineering person, is always disagreeable and always a
bore, and the nearer it is to the scene of domination the more
disagreeable and wearisome it becomes, just as a tyrannical man is worst
at home. I have known English people start as quiet, pleasing, modest,
and amiable passengers in a P. & O. from Marseilles, but become less
endurable every twenty-four hours of the fortnight to Bombay. There are
noble and conspicuous exceptions alike in the army, the Indian Civil
Service, and among the officials scattered over the Empire. But, as a
rule, we may say that the worst characteristics not only of our own but
of all dominant races, such as the French, Germans, and Russians, are
displayed among their subject peoples. If, indeed, the subjects are on a
level with spaniels that can be beaten or patted alternately and retain
a constant affection and respect, the English son of squires thoroughly
enjoys his position and does the beating and patting well. But it is
always with a certain loss of humour and common humanity: it brings a
kind of stiffness and pedantry such as Charles Lamb complained of in the
old-fashioned type of schoolmaster. It exaggerates a sense of
Heaven-born superiority which the English squire has no need to
exaggerate.

I am not one of those who set out to "crab" their countrymen. We have
lately had so much criticism and contempt poured upon us by more
intelligent people like the Irish, the Germans, and an ex-President of
the United States that sometimes I have been driven to wonder whether we
may not somewhere possess some element worthy of respect. But, keeping
the lash in our own discriminating hands, we should all perhaps confess
that in regard to other people's feelings and ideas we are rather
insensitive as a nation. This form of unimaginative obtuseness
undoubtedly increased during the extension of our grip upon subject
races between the overthrow of Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill and the
end of the Boer War. Perhaps those fifteen years were the most entirely
vulgar period of our history, and vulgarity springs from an insensitive
condition of mind. It will be a terrible recompense if the price of our
world-wide Empire is an Imperial vulgarity upon which t