y.
But France had been diverted to North Africa, Russia to Eastern Asia,
and Germany was already the most considered antagonist in our path
towards an empire over the world.

This was the spacious and by no means ignoble project of the later
nineties. Most of us Harbury boys, trained as I had been trained to be
uncritical, saw the national outlook in those terms. We knew little or
nothing, until the fierce wranglings of the Free Traders and Tariff
Reformers a few years later brought it home to us, of the commercial,
financial and squalid side of our relations with the vast congeries of
exploited new territories and subordinated and subjugated populations.
We knew nothing of the social conditions of the mass of people in our
own country. We were blankly ignorant of economics. We knew nothing of
that process of expropriation and the exploitation of labor which is
giving the world the Servile State. The very phrase was twenty years
ahead of us. We believed that an Englishman was a better thing in every
way than any other sort of man, that English literature, science and
philosophy were a shining and unapproachable light to all other peoples,
that our soldiers were better than all other soldiers and our sailors
than all other sailors. Such civilization and enterprise as existed in
Germany for instance we regarded as a shadow, an envious shadow,
following our own; it was still generally believed in those days that
German trade was concerned entirely with the dishonest imitation of our
unapproachable English goods. And as for the United States, well, the
United States though blessed with a strain of English blood, were
nevertheless "out of it," marooned in a continent of their own and--we
had to admit it--corrupt.

Given such ignorance, you know, it wasn't by any means ignoble to be
patriotic, to dream of this propagandist Empire of ours spreading its
great peace and culture, its virtue and its amazing and unprecedented
honesty,--its honesty!--round the world.

Sec. 2

When I look and try to recover those early intentions of mine I am
astonished at the way in which I took them ready-made from the world
immediately about me. In some way I seem to have stopped looking--if
ever I had begun looking--at the heights and depths above and below that
immediate life. I seem to have regarded these profounder realities no
more during this phase of concentration than a cow in a field regards
the sky. My father's vestments, the Burn