, whether they
have considered the possibility of a new series of crusades, by ardent
African Salvationists, to rescue Paris from the grip of the modern
scientific "infidel," and to raise the cry of "Back to the Apostles:
back to Charlemagne!"

We are more fortunate in that an overwhelming majority of our subjects
are Hindoos, Mahometans and Buddhists: that is, they have, as a
prophylactic against salvationist Christianity, highly civilized
religions of their own. Mahometanism, which Napoleon at the end of his
career classed as perhaps the best popular religion for modern political
use, might in some respects have arisen as a reformed Christianity
if Mahomet had had to deal with a population of seventeenth-century
Christians instead of Arabs who worshipped stones. As it is, men do not
reject Mahomet for Calvin; and to offer a Hindoo so crude a theology as
ours in exchange for his own, or our Jewish canonical literature as an
improvement on Hindoo scripture, is to offer old lamps for older ones in
a market where the oldest lamps, like old furniture in England, are the
most highly valued.

Yet, I repeat, government is impossible without a religion: that is,
without a body of common assumptions. The open mind never acts: when
we have done our utmost to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, we still,
when we can reason and investigate no more, must close our minds for the
moment with a snap, and act dogmatically on our conclusions. The man
who waits to make an entirely reasonable will dies intestate. A man so
reasonable as to have an open mind about theft and murder, or about
the need for food and reproduction, might just as well be a fool and a
scoundrel for any use he could be as a legislator or a State official.
The modern pseudo-democratic statesman, who says that he is only in
power to carry out the will of the people, and moves only as the cat
jumps, is clearly a political and intellectual brigand. The rule of the
negative man who has no convictions means in practice the rule of the
positive mob. Freedom of conscience as Cromwell used the phrase is an
excellent thing; nevertheless if any man had proposed to give effect to
freedom of conscience as to cannibalism in England, Cromwell would have
laid him by the heels almost as promptly as he would have laid a Roman
Catholic, though in Fiji at the same moment he would have supported
heartily the freedom of conscience of a vegetarian who disparaged the
sacred diet of Long P