ly compelled, in so far
as he makes laws against blasphemy at all, to treat all the religions,
including Christianity, as blasphemous, when paraded before people who
are not accustomed to them and do not want them. And even that is a
concession to a mischievous intolerance which an empire should use its
control of education to eradicate.

On the other hand, Governments cannot really divest themselves of
religion, or even of dogma. When Jesus said that people should not only
live but live more abundantly, he was dogmatizing; and many Pessimist
sages, including Shakespear, whose hero begged his friend to refrain
from suicide in the words "Absent thee from felicity awhile," would say
dogmatizing very perniciously. Indeed many preachers and saints declare,
some of them in the name of Jesus himself, that this world is a vale
of tears, and that our lives had better be passed in sorrow and even
in torment, as a preparation for a better life to come. Make these sad
people comfortable; and they baffle you by putting on hair shirts. None
the less, governments must proceed on dogmatic assumptions, whether they
call them dogmas or not; and they must clearly be assumptions common
enough to stamp those who reject them as eccentrics or lunatics. And
the greater and more heterogeneous the population the commoner
the assumptions must be. A Trappist monastery can be conducted on
assumptions which would in twenty-fours hours provoke the village at its
gates to insurrection. That is because the monastery selects its people;
and if a Trappist does not like it he can leave it. But a subject of the
British Empire or the French Republic is not selected; and if he does
not like it he must lump it; for emigration is practicable only
within narrow limits, and seldom provides an effective remedy, all
civilizations being now much alike. To anyone capable of comprehending
government at all it must be evident without argument that the set of
fundamental assumptions drawn up in the thirty-nine articles or in the
Westminster Confession are wildly impossible as political constitutions
for modern empires. A personal profession of them by any person disposed
to take such professions seriously would practically disqualify him
for high imperial office. A Calvinist Viceroy of India and a Particular
Baptist Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs would wreck the empire.
The Stuarts wrecked even the tight little island which was the nucleus
of the empire by the