immediately realises that his
only chance of maintaining his position is to put his tongue out at the
little hooligan. The hooligan may or may not have any respect at all for
the Lord Chief Justice: that is a matter which we may contentedly leave
as a solemn psychological mystery. But if the hooligan has any respect
at all for the Lord Chief Justice, that respect is certainly extended to
the Lord Chief Justice entirely because he does not put his tongue out.

Exactly in the same way the ruder or more sluggish races regard the
civilisation of Christendom. If they have any respect for it, it is
precisely because it does not use their own coarse and cruel expedients.
According to some modern moralists whenever Zulus cut off the heads of
dead Englishmen, Englishmen must cut off the heads of dead Zulus.
Whenever Arabs or Egyptians constantly use the whip to their slaves,
Englishmen must use the whip to their subjects. And on a similar
principle (I suppose), whenever an English Admiral has to fight
cannibals the English Admiral ought to eat them. However unattractive a
menu consisting entirely of barbaric kings may appear to an English
gentleman, he must try to sit down to it with an appetite. He must fight
the Sandwich Islanders with their own weapons; and their own weapons are
knives and forks. But the truth of the matter is, of course, that to do
this kind of thing is to break the whole spell of our supremacy. All the
mystery of the white man, all the fearful poetry of the white man, so
far as it exists in the eyes of these savages, consists in the fact that
we do not do such things. The Zulus point at us and say, "Observe the
advent of these inexplicable demi-gods, these magicians, who do not cut
off the noses of their enemies." The Soudanese say to each other, "This
hardy people never flogs its servants; it is superior to the simplest
and most obvious human pleasures." And the cannibals say, "The austere
and terrible race, the race that denies itself even boiled missionary,
is upon us: let us flee."

Whether or no these details are a little conjectural, the general
proposition I suggest is the plainest common sense. The elements that
make Europe upon the whole the most humanitarian civilisation are
precisely the elements that make it upon the whole the strongest. For
the power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same
as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination. It is
imagination