ratic, for the English franchise has certainly grown more
democratic. I could also make out that the world has been growing more
aristocratic, for the English Public Schools have certainly grown more
aristocratic I could prove the decline of militarism by the decline of
flogging; I could prove the increase of militarism by the increase of
standing armies and conscription. But I can prove anything in this way.
I can prove that the world has always been growing greener. Only lately
men have invented absinthe and the _Westminster Gazette_. I could prove
the world has grown less green. There are no more Robin Hood foresters,
and fields are being covered with houses. I could show that the world
was less red with khaki or more red with the new penny stamps. But in
all cases progress means progress only in some particular thing. Have
you ever noticed that strange line of Tennyson, in which he confesses,
half consciously, how very _conventional_ progress is?--

"Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing
grooves of change."

Even in praising change, he takes for a simile the most unchanging
thing. He calls our modern change a groove. And it is a groove; perhaps
there was never anything so groovy.

Nothing would induce me in so idle a monologue as this to discuss
adequately a great political matter like the question of the military
punishments in Egypt. But I may suggest one broad reality to be observed
by both sides, and which is, generally speaking, observed by neither.
Whatever else is right, it is utterly wrong to employ the argument that
we Europeans must do to savages and Asiatics whatever savages and
Asiatics do to us. I have even seen some controversialists use the
metaphor, "We must fight them with their own weapons." Very well; let
those controversialists take their metaphor, and take it literally. Let
us fight the Soudanese with their own weapons. Their own weapons are
large, very clumsy knives, with an occasional old-fashioned gun. Their
own weapons are also torture and slavery. If we fight them with torture
and slavery, we shall be fighting badly, precisely as if we fought them
with clumsy knives and old guns. That is the whole strength of our
Christian civilisation, that it does fight with its own weapons and not
with other people's. It is not true that superiority suggests a tit for
tat. It is not true that if a small hooligan puts his tongue out at the
Lord Chief Justice, the Lord Chief Justice