it in the impartial historians of the Victorian Age,
who now seem far more Victorian than the partial historians. Hallam
wrote about the Middle Ages; but Hallam was far less mediaeval than
Macaulay; for Macaulay was at least a fighter. Huxley had more mediaeval
sympathies than Herbert Spencer for the same reason; that Huxley was a
fighter. They both fought in many ways for the limitations of their own
rationalistic epoch; but they were nearer the truth than the men who
simply assumed those limitations as rational. The war of the
controversionalists was a wider thing than the peace of the arbiters.
And in the same way the Englishman never cuts a less convincing figure
before other nations than when he tries to arbitrate between them.

I have by this time heard a great deal about the necessity of saving
Anglo-American friendship, a necessity which I myself feel rather too
strongly to be satisfied with the ambassadorial and editorial style of
achieving it. I have already said that the worst style of all is to be
Anglo-American; or, as the more illiterate would express, to be
Anglo-Saxon. I am more and more convinced that the way for the
Englishman to do it is to be English; but to know that he is English and
not everything else as well. Thus the only sincere answer to Irish
nationalism is English nationalism, which is a reality; and not English
imperialism, which is a reactionary fiction, or English
internationalism, which is a revolutionary one.

For the English are reviled for their imperialism because they are not
imperialistic. They dislike it, which is the real reason why they do it
badly; and they do it badly, which is the real reason why they are
disliked when they do it. Nobody calls France imperialistic because she
has absorbed Brittany. But everybody calls England imperialistic because
she has not absorbed Ireland. The Englishman is fixed and frozen for
ever in the attitude of a ruthless conqueror; not because he has
conquered such people, but because he has not conquered them; but he is
always trying to conquer them with a heroism worthy of a better cause.
For the really native and vigorous part of what is unfortunately called
the British Empire is not an empire at all, and does not consist of
these conquered provinces at all. It is not an empire but an adventure;
which is probably a much finer thing. It was not the power of making
strange countries similar to our own, but simply the pleasure of seeing
strange