Such a temper
of mind may, at the first touch of resistance, transform your stolid,
laudable, laughable Englishman into the beastliest of tyrants. It may
drive him into a delirium of cruelty and injustice. It may sweep away,
in one ruin of war, wealth, culture, and the whole fabric of
civilisation. It may darken counsel, and corrupt thought. In fact, it
may give you something very like the history of the English in Ireland.
Now it is not denied that most Englishmen believe the English mind to be
incapable of such excesses. This, they say, is the Russian in Warsaw,
the Austrian in Budapest, the Belgian in the Congo, the blind fool-fury
of the Seine. But it is not the English way. Nor is it suggested that
this illusion is sheer and mere hypocrisy. It is simply an hallucination
of jingoism. Take a trivial instance in point. We have all read in the
newspapers derisive accounts of disorderly scenes in the French Chamber
or the Austrian Reichstag; we all know the complacent sigh with which
England is wont on such occasions to thank God that she is not as one
of those.
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