“Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing
  grooves of change.”

Even in praising change, he takes for a simile the most unchanging thing.  He calls our modern change a groove.  And it is a groove; perhaps there was never anything so groovy.

Nothing would induce me in so idle a monologue as this to discuss adequately a great political matter like the question of the military punishments in Egypt.  But I may suggest one broad reality to be observed by both sides, and which is, generally speaking, observed by neither.  Whatever else is right, it is utterly wrong to employ the argument that we Europeans must do to savages and Asiatics whatever savages and Asiatics do to us.  I have even seen some controversialists use the metaphor, “We must fight them with their own weapons.”  Very well; let those controversialists take their metaphor, and take it literally.  Let us fight the Soudanese with their own weapons.  Their own weapons are large, very clumsy knives, with an occasional old-fashioned gun.  Their own weapons are also torture and slavery.  If we fight them with torture and slavery, we shall be fighting badly, precisely as if we fought them with clumsy knives and old guns.  That is the whole strength of our Christian civilisation, that it does fight with its own weapons and not with other people’s.  It is not true that superiority suggests a tit for tat.  It is not true that if a small hooligan puts his tongue out at the Lord Chief Justice, the Lord Chief Justice immediately realises that his only chance of maintaining his position is to put his tongue out at the little hooligan.  The hooligan may or may not have any respect at all for the Lord Chief Justice:  that is a matter which we may contentedly leave as a solemn psychological mystery.  But if the hooligan has any respect at all for the Lord Chief Justice, that respect is certainly extended to the Lord Chief Justice entirely because he does not put his tongue out.

Exactly in the same way the ruder or more sluggish races regard the civilisation of Christendom.  If they have any respect for it, it is precisely because it does not use their own coarse and cruel expedients.  According to some modern moralists whenever Zulus cut off the heads of dead Englishmen, Englishmen must cut off the heads of dead Zulus.  Whenever Arabs or Egyptians constantly use the whip to their slaves, Englishmen must use the whip to their subjects.  And on a similar principle (I suppose), whenever an English Admiral has to fight cannibals the English Admiral ought to eat them.  However unattractive a menu consisting entirely of barbaric kings may appear to an English gentleman, he must try to sit down to it with an appetite.  He must fight the Sandwich Islanders with their own weapons; and their own weapons are knives and forks.  But the truth of the matter is, of course, that to do this kind of thing is to break the whole spell of our supremacy.  All the mystery of the white man, all the fearful poetry of