the dukes can't realise how much happier even
they would be in a free, a beautiful, and a well-organised community.
Imaginative minds can picture a world where everything is so ordered
that life comes as a constant aesthetic delight to everybody. They know
that that world could be realised to-morrow--if only all others could
picture it to themselves as vividly as they do. But they also know that
it can only be attained in the end by long ages of struggle, and by slow
evolution of the essentially imaginative ethical faculty. For right
action depends most of all, in the last resort, upon a graphic
conception of the feelings of others.

XX.

_ABOUT ABROAD._

The place known as Abroad is not nearly so nice a country to live in as
England. The people who inhabit Abroad are called Foreigners. They are
in every way and at all times inferior to Englishmen.

These Post-Prandials used once to be provided with a sting in their
tail, like the common scorpion. By way of change, I turn them out now
with a sting in their head, like the common mosquito. Mosquitoes are
much less dangerous than scorpions, but they're a deal more irritating.

Not that I am sanguine enough to expect I shall irritate Englishmen.
Your Englishman is far too cock-sure of the natural superiority of
Britons to Foreigners, the natural superiority of England to Abroad,
ever to be irritated by even the gentlest criticism. He accepts it all
with lordly indifference. He brushes it aside as the elephant might
brush aside the ineffective gadfly. No proboscis can pierce that
pachydermatous hide of his. If you praise him to his face, he accepts
your praise as his obvious due, with perfect composure and without the
slightest elation. If you blame him in aught, he sets it down to your
ignorance and mental inferiority. You say to him, "Oh, Englishman, you
are great; you are wise; you are rich beyond comparison. You are noble;
you are generous; you are the prince among nations." He smiles a calm
smile, and thinks you a very sensible fellow. But you add, "Oh, my lord,
if I may venture to say so, there is a smudge on your nose, which I make
bold to attribute to the settlement of a black on your intelligent
countenance." He is not angry. He is not even contemptuously amused. He
responds, "My friend, you are wrong. There is never a smudge on my
immaculate face. No blacks fly in London. The sky is as clear there in
November as in August. All is pure and serene and be