Think of Macaulay's "horror and amazement," and read this further in the same essay: "Every man who has seen the world knows that nothing is so useless as a general maxim. If it be very moral and very true it may serve for a copy to a charity boy." So the very moral and the very true are not for the statesman but for the charity-boy. This perhaps may be defended as irony; hardly, but even so, in such irony the character appears as plainly as in volumes of solemn rant. To us it stands out clearly as the characteristic attitude of the English Government. The English people are used to it, practise it, and will put up with it; but the Irish people never were, are not now, and never will be used to it; and we won't put up with it. We get calm as old atrocities recede into history, but to repeat the old cant, above all to try and sustain such now, sets all the old fire blazing--blazing with a fierceness that will end only with the British connection.
Not many of us in Ireland will be deceived by Macaulay, but there is danger in an occasional note of writers, such as Bernard Shaw and Stuart Mill. Our instinct often saves us by natural repugnance from the hypocrite, when we may be confused by some sentiment of a sincere man, not foreseeing its tendency. When an aggressive power looks for an opening for aggression it first looks for a pretext, and our danger lies in men's readiness to give it the pretext. Such a sentiment as this from Mill--on "Liberty"--gives the required opening: "Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with Barbarians, provided the end be their improvement"; or this from Shaw's preface to the Home Rule edition of "John Bull's Other Island": "I am prepared to Steam-roll Tibet if Tibet persist in refusing me my international rights." Now, it is within our right to enforce a principle within our own territory, but to force it on other people, called for the occasion "barbarians," is quite another thing. Shaw may get wrathful, and genuinely so, over the Denshawai horror, and expose it nakedly and vividly as he did in his first edition of "John Bull's Other Island," Preface for Politicians; but the aggressors are undisturbed as long as he gives them pretexts with his "steam-roll Tibet" phrase. And when he says further that he is prepared to co-operate with France, Italy, Russia, Germany and England in Morocco, Tripoli, Siberia and Africa to civilise these places, not only are his denunciations of Denshawai horrors of no avail--except to draw tears after the event--but he cannot co-operate in the civilising process without practising the cruelty; and perhaps in their privacy the empire-makers may smile when Shaw writes of Empire with evident earnestness as "a name that every man who has ever felt the sacredness of his own native soil to him, and thus learnt to regard that feeling in other men as something holy and inviolable, spits out of his mouth with enormous contempt." When, further, in his "Representative Government" Mill tells the English people--a thing about which Shaw has no illusions--that they are "the power which of all in existence best understands liberty, and, whatever may have been its errors in the past, has attained to more of conscience and moral principle in its dealing with foreigners than any other great nation seems either to conceive as possible or recognise as desirable"--they not only go forward to civilise the barbarians by Denshawai horrors, but they do so unctuously in the true Macaulayan style. We feel a natural wrath at all this, not unmingled with amusement and amazement. In studying the question we read much that rouses anger and contempt, but one must laugh out heartily in coming to this gem of Mill's, uttered with all Mill's solemnity: "Place-hunting is a form of ambition to which the English, considered nationally, are almost strangers." When the sincerest expression of the English mind can produce this we need to have our wits about us; and when, as just now, so much nonsense, and dangerous nonsense, is being poured abroad about the Empire, we need to pause, carefully consider all these things, and be on our guard.