Parisian shops,
you cannot look at them steadily for two minutes without feeling the
full distance between, let us say, King Leopold and fighters like
Clemenceau and Deroulede.

.....

For all these reasons, and many more, when I had got into Brussels I
began to make all necessary arrangements for getting out of it again;
and I had impulsively got into a tram which seemed to be going out of
the city. In this tram there were two men talking; one was a little
man with a black French beard; the other was a baldish man with bushy
whiskers, like the financial foreign count in a three-act farce. And
about the time that we reached the suburb of the city, and the traffic
grew thinner, and the noises more few, I began to hear what they were
saying. Though they spoke French quickly, their words were fairly easy
to follow, because they were all long words. Anybody can understand long
words because they have in them all the lucidity of Latin.

The man with the black beard said: "It must that we have the Progress."

The man with the whiskers parried this smartly by saying: "It must also
that we have the Consolidation International."

This is a sort of discussion which I like myself, so I listened with
some care, and I think I picked up the thread of it. One of the Belgians
was a Little Belgian, as we speak of a Little Englander. The other was a
Belgian Imperialist, for though Belgium is not quite strong enough to be
altogether a nation, she is quite strong enough to be an empire. Being
a nation means standing up to your equals, whereas being an empire only
means kicking your inferiors. The man with whiskers was the Imperialist,
and he was saying: "The science, behold there the new guide of
humanity."

And the man with the beard answered him: "It does not suffice to have
progress in the science; one must have it also in the sentiment of the
human justice."

This remark I applauded, as if at a public meeting, but they were much
too keen on their argument to hear me. The views I have often heard
in England, but never uttered so lucidly, and certainly never so fast.
Though Belgian by nation they must both have been essentially French.
Whiskers was great on education, which, it seems, is on the march.
All the world goes to make itself instructed. It must that the more
instructed enlighten the less instructed. Eh, well then, the European
must impose upon the savage the science and the light. Also (apparently)
he must impose hims