ve 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 SULTAN

There 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. He had only a hasty but elaborate machinery for spreading the
principles that he hadn't got. What he called his ideals were the dregs
of a Darwinism which had already grown not only stagnant, but poisonous.
That the fittest must survive, and that any one like himself mus