hakespeare
justifies the French War, and sticks to Talbot and defies the legend
of Joan of Arc. Mr. Kipling would not dare to justify the American
War, stick to Burgoyne, and defy the legend of Washington. Yet there
really was much more to be said for George III. than there ever was
for Henry V. It was not said, much less acted upon, by the modern
Imperialists; because of this basic modern sense, that as the future
is inevitable, so is the past irrevocable. Any fact so complete as the
American exodus from the Empire must be considered as final for aeons,
though it hardly happened more than a hundred years ago. Merely
because it has managed to occur it must be called first, a necessary
evil, and then an indispensable good. I need not add that I do not
want to reconquer America; but then I am not an Imperialist.

Then there is another way of testing it: ask yourself how many people
you have met who grumbled at a thing as incurable, and how many who
attacked it as curable? How many people we have heard abuse the
British elementary schools, as they would abuse the British climate?
How few have we met who realised that British education can be
altered, but British weather cannot? How few there were that knew that
the clouds were more immortal and more solid than the schools? For a
thousand that regret compulsory education, where is the hundred, or
the ten, or the one, who would repeal compulsory education? Indeed,
the very word proves my case by its unpromising and unfamiliar sound.
At the beginning of our epoch men talked with equal ease about Reform
and Repeal. Now everybody talks about reform; but nobody talks about
repeal. Our fathers did not talk of Free Trade, but of the Repeal of
the Corn Laws. They did not talk of Home Rule, but of the Repeal of
the Union. In those days people talked of a "Repealer" as the most
practical of all politicians, the kind of politician that carries a
club. Now the Repealer is flung far into the province of an impossible
idealism: and the leader of one of our great parties, having said, in
a heat of temporary sincerity, that he would repeal an Act, actually
had to write to all the papers to assure them that he would only amend
it. I need not multiply instances, though they might be multiplied
almost to a million. The note of the age is to suggest that the past
may just as well be praised, since it cannot be mended. Men actually
in that past have toiled like ants and died like locusts to und