This is a small but exact symbol of the failure of scientific civilisation.It is so satisfied in knowing it has a photograph of a man that it never asks whether it has a likeness of him.Thus declarations,seemingly most detailed,have flashed along the wires of the world ever since I was a boy.We were told that in some row Boer policemen had shot an Englishman,a British subject,an English citizen.A long time afterwards we were quite casually informed that the English citizen was quite black.Well,it makes no difference to the moral question;black men should be shot on the same ethical principles as white men.But it makes one distrust scientific communications which permitted so startling an alteration of the photograph.I am sorry we got hold of a photographic negative in which a black man came out white.Later we were told that an Englishman had fought for the Boers against his own flag,which would have been a disgusting thing to do.Later,it was admitted that he was an Irishman;which is exactly as different as if he had been a Pole.Common sense,with all the facts before it,does see that black is not white,and that a nation that has never submitted has a right to moral independence.But why does it so seldom have all the facts before it?Why are the big aggressive features,such as blackness or the Celtic wrath,always left out in such official communications,as they were left out in the photograph?My friend the poet had hair as black as an African and eyes as fierce as an Irishman;why does our civilisation drop all four of the facts?Its error is to omit the arresting thing--which might really arrest the criminal.It strikes first the chilling note of science,demanding a man "above the middle height,chin shaven,with gray moustache,"etc.,which might mean Mr.Balfour or Sir Redvers Buller.
It does not seize the first fact of impression,as that a man is obviously a sailor or a Jew or a drunkard or a gentleman or a nigger or an albino or a prize-fighter or an imbecile or an American.These are the realities by which the people really recognise each other.They are almost always left out of the inquiry.,THE SULTANThere is one deep defect in our extension of cosmopolitan and Imperial cultures.That is,that in most human things if you spread your butter far you spread it thin.But there is an odder fact yet:rooted in something dark and irrational in human nature.That is,that when you find your butter thin,you begin to spread it.And it is just when you find your ideas wearing thin in your own mind that you begin to spread them among your fellow-creatures.It is a paradox;but not my paradox.
There are numerous cases in history;but I think the strongest case is this.That we have Imperialism in all our clubs at the very time when we have Orientalism in all our drawing-rooms.
I mean that the colonial ideal of such men as Cecil Rhodes did not arise out of any fresh creative idea of the Western genius,it was a fad,and like most fads an imitation.For what was wrong with Rhodes was not that,like Cromwell or Hildebrand,he made huge mistakes,nor even that he committed great crimes.It was that he committed these crimes and errors in order to spread certain ideas.And when one asked for the ideas they could not be found.Cromwell stood for Calvinism,Hildebrand for Catholicism:but Rhodes had no principles whatever to give to the world.
