t and no question as to what he did, the
whole story being recorded by himself, we must hold England responsible
for his conduct, whilst taking your word for the fact, which has no
importance for us, that his conduct has nothing to do with his
character."

*Our Intellectual Laziness.*

The general truth of the situation is, as I have spent so much of my
life in trying to make the English understand, that we are cursed with a
fatal intellectual laziness, an evil inheritance from the time when our
monopoly of coal and iron made it possible for us to become rich and
powerful without thinking or knowing how; a laziness which is becoming
highly dangerous to us now that our monopoly is gone or superseded by
new sources of mechanical energy. We got rich by pursuing our own
immediate advantage instinctively; that is, with a natural childish
selfishness; and when any question of our justification arose, we found
it easy to silence it with any sort of plausible twaddle (provided it
flattered us, and did not imply any trouble or sacrifice) provided by
our curates at L70 a year, or our journalists at a penny a line, or
commercial moralists with axes to grind. In the end we became fatheaded,
and not only lost all intellectual consciousness of what we were doing,
and with it all power of objective self-criticism, but stacked up a
lumber of pious praises for ourselves which not only satisfied our
corrupted and half atrophied consciences, but gave us a sense that there
is something extraordinarily ungentlemanly and politically dangerous in
bringing these pious phrases to the test of conduct. We carried Luther's
doctrine of Justification by Faith to the insane point of believing that
as long as a man says what we have agreed to accept as the right thing
it does not matter in the least what he actually does. In fact, we do
not clearly see why a man need introduce the subject of morals at all,
unless there is something questionable to be whitewashed. The
unprejudiced foreigner calls this hypocrisy: that is why we call him
prejudiced. But I, who have been a poor man in a poor country,
understand the foreigner better.

Now from the general to the particular. In describing the course of the
diplomatic negotiations by which our Foreign Office achieved its design
of at last settling accounts with Germany at the most favourable moment
from the Militarist point of view, I shall have to exhibit our Secretary
of State for Foreign Affairs as b