es found
themselves to impose their domination on the colored races by
priestcraft, making a virtue and a popular religion of drudgery and
submissiveness in this world not only as a means of achieving
saintliness of character but of securing a reward in heaven. Here you
have the slave-morality view formulated by a Scotch philosopher long
before English writers began chattering about Nietzsche.

As Mr Stuart-Glennie traced the evolution of society to the conflict of
races, his theory made some sensation among Socialists--that is, among
the only people who were seriously thinking about historical evolution
at all--by its collision with the class-conflict theory of Karl Marx.
Nietzsche, as I gather, regarded the slave-morality as having been
invented and imposed on the world by slaves making a virtue of
necessity and a religion of their servitude. Mr Stuart-Glennie regards
the slave-morality as an invention of the superior white race to
subjugate the minds of the inferior races whom they wished to exploit,
and who would have destroyed them by force of numbers if their minds
had not been subjugated. As this process is in operation still, and can
be studied at first hand not only in our Church schools and in the
struggle between our modern proprietary classes and the proletariat,
but in the part played by Christian missionaries in reconciling the
black races of Africa to their subjugation by European Capitalism, we
can judge for ourselves whether the initiative came from above or
below. My object here is not to argue the historical point, but simply
to make our theatre critics ashamed of their habit of treating Britain
as an intellectual void, and assuming that every philosophical idea,
every historic theory, every criticism of our moral, religious and
juridical institutions, must necessarily be either imported from
abroad, or else a fantastic sally (in rather questionable taste)
totally unrelated to the existing body of thought. I urge them to
remember that this body of thought is the slowest of growths and the
rarest of blossomings, and that if there is such a thing on the
philosophic plane as a matter of course, it is that no individual can
make more than a minute contribution to it. In fact, their conception
of clever persons parthenogenetically bringing forth complete original
cosmogonies by dint of sheer "brilliancy" is part of that ignorant
credulity which is the despair of the honest philosopher, and the
opportunity