ir Scottish logic and theological dogma; and it may
be sustained very plausibly that the alleged aptitude of the English
for self-government, which is contradicted by every chapter of their
history, is really only an incurable inaptitude for theology, and indeed
for co-ordinated thought in any direction, which makes them equally
impatient of systematic despotism and systematic good government: their
history being that of a badly governed and accidentally free people
(comparatively). Thus our success in colonizing, as far as it has
not been produced by exterminating the natives, has been due to our
indifference to the salvation of our subjects. Ireland is the exception
which proves the rule; for Ireland, the standing instance of the
inability of the English to colonize without extermination of natives,
is also the one country under British rule in which the conquerors
and colonizers proceeded on the assumption that their business was to
establish Protestantism as well as to make money and thereby secure at
least the lives of the unfortunate inhabitants out of whose labor
it could be made. At this moment Ulster is refusing to accept
fellowcitizenship with the other Irish provinces because the south
believes in St. Peter and Bossuet, and the north in St. Paul and Calvin.
Imagine the effect of trying to govern India or Egypt from Belfast or
from the Vatican!

The position is perhaps graver for France than for England, because
the sixty-five per cent of French subjects who are neither French nor
Christian nor Modernist includes some thirty millions of negroes who
are susceptible, and indeed highly susceptible, of conversion to those
salvationist forms of pseudo-Christianity which have produced all the
persecutions and religious wars of the last fifteen hundred years. When
the late explorer Sir Henry Stanley told me of the emotional grip which
Christianity had over the Baganda tribes, and read me their letters,
which were exactly like medieval letters in their literal faith and
everpresent piety, I said "Can these men handle a rifle?" To which
Stanley replied with some scorn "Of course they can, as well as any
white man." Now at this moment (1915) a vast European war is being
waged, in which the French are using Senegalese soldiers. I ask the
French Government, which, like our own Government, is deliberately
leaving the religious instruction of these negroes in the hands of
missions of Petrine Catholics and Pauline Calvinists