olumns
of the London Press to overturn the Pyramids in ruins and to alter the
course of the Danube. We have had a characteristic flow of popular
indignation over the execution of Mr Benton, a British citizen, in
Mexico. Probably not one Englishman in a million had ever heard of Mr
Benton before, but no sooner was he executed and in his grave than he
rose, as it were, the very impersonation of British citizenship
outraged by foreigners. On the whole, there is nothing healthier than
group-indignation of the kind that sees in an injury to one an injury
to all--that demands just dealing for even the poorest and least
distinguished member of the group. It is the sort of passion it would
be pleasant to see trained and developed. My only complaint against it
is that in the present state of the world it is too often reserved
for foreigners and for those semi-foreigners, the people who belong to
a different political party or social class from your own. One would
have thought, for instance, that the group-indignation which denounced
the execution of Mr Benton without a fair trial might also have
denounced the expulsion of the labour leaders from South Africa with
no trial at all. The fact that it did not and that several of the
London capitalist papers treated the whole South African episode as a
good joke at the expense of Labour is evidence that to a good many
Englishmen the maltreatment of British citizens is not in itself an
objectionable thing, provided it happens within the British Empire. It
seems to me that this is an entirely topsy-turvy kind of patriotism.
For every British citizen who is likely to be badly treated abroad,
there must be thousands who are in danger of being badly treated in
the British Empire itself. Is not the killing of an Englishman by an
English railway company, for instance, as outrageous a crime as the
killing of an Englishman by a foreign general? There is also this to
be remembered: your indignation against the criminal in your own
country is more likely to bear fruit than your indignation against the
criminal in a foreign country. You can catch your English
railway-director with a single policeman; you may not be able to
catch your foreigner without an international war. Thus, though I do
not question the occasional value of indignation against wicked
foreigners, I contend that a true economy of indignation would lead to
most of its being directed against wicked fellow-countrymen.

It may be r