English people start as quiet, pleasing, modest, and amiable passengers in a P. & O. from Marseilles, but become less endurable every twenty-four hours of the fortnight to Bombay.  There are noble and conspicuous exceptions alike in the army, the Indian Civil Service, and among the officials scattered over the Empire.  But, as a rule, we may say that the worst characteristics not only of our own but of all dominant races, such as the French, Germans, and Russians, are displayed among their subject peoples.  If, indeed, the subjects are on a level with spaniels that can be beaten or patted alternately and retain a constant affection and respect, the English son of squires thoroughly enjoys his position and does the beating and patting well.  But it is always with a certain loss of humour and common humanity:  it brings a kind of stiffness and pedantry such as Charles Lamb complained of in the old-fashioned type of schoolmaster.  It exaggerates a sense of Heaven-born superiority which the English squire has no need to exaggerate.

I am not one of those who set out to “crab” their countrymen.  We have lately had so much criticism and contempt poured upon us by more intelligent people like the Irish, the Germans, and an ex-President of the United States that sometimes I have been driven to wonder whether we may not somewhere possess some element worthy of respect.  But, keeping the lash in our own discriminating hands, we should all perhaps confess that in regard to other people’s feelings and ideas we are rather insensitive as a nation.  This form of unimaginative obtuseness undoubtedly increased during the extension of our grip upon subject races between the overthrow of Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill and the end of the Boer War.  Perhaps those fifteen years were the most entirely vulgar period of our history, and vulgarity springs from an insensitive condition of mind.  It will be a terrible recompense if the price of our world-wide Empire is an Imperial vulgarity upon which the sun never sets.

There is another danger, not so subtle and pervading, but more likely to escape the notice of people who are not themselves acquainted with the frontiers of Empire.  It is the production and encouragement of a set of scoundrels and wasters who trade upon our country’s prestige to rob, harry, and even enslave the members of a subject race while they pose as pioneers of Empire and are held up by sentimental travellers, like Mr. Roosevelt, as examples of toughness and courage to the victims of monotonous toil who live at home at ease.  There is no call either for Mr. Roosevelt’s pity or admiration.  I have known those wasters well, and have studied all their tricks for turning a dirty half-crown.  They enjoy more pleasure and greater ease in a day than any London shop assistant or bank clerk in a month.  They take up the white man’s burden and find it light, because it is the black man who carries it.  Of all the impostors that nestle under our flag, I have found none more contented with