the white man, so far as it exists in the eyes of these savages, consists in the fact that we do not do such things.  The Zulus point at us and say, “Observe the advent of these inexplicable demi-gods, these magicians, who do not cut off the noses of their enemies.”  The Soudanese say to each other, “This hardy people never flogs its servants; it is superior to the simplest and most obvious human pleasures.”  And the cannibals say, “The austere and terrible race, the race that denies itself even boiled missionary, is upon us:  let us flee.”

Whether or no these details are a little conjectural, the general proposition I suggest is the plainest common sense.  The elements that make Europe upon the whole the most humanitarian civilisation are precisely the elements that make it upon the whole the strongest.  For the power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination.  It is imagination that makes a man outwit his enemy, and it is imagination that makes him spare his enemy.  It is precisely because this picturing of the other man’s point of view is in the main a thing in which Christians and Europeans specialise that Christians and Europeans, with all their faults, have carried to such perfection both the arts of peace and war.

They alone have invented machine-guns, and they alone have invented ambulances; they have invented ambulances (strange as it may sound) for the same reason for which they have invented machine-guns.  Both involve a vivid calculation of remote events.  It is precisely because the East, with all its wisdom, is cruel, that the East, with all its wisdom, is weak.  And it is precisely because savages are pitiless that they are still—­merely savages.  If they could imagine their enemy’s sufferings they could also imagine his tactics.  If Zulus did not cut off the Englishman’s head they might really borrow it.  For if you do not understand a man you cannot crush him.  And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

When I was about seven years old I used to think that the chief modern danger was a danger of over-civilisation.  I am inclined to think now that the chief modern danger is that of a slow return towards barbarism, just such a return towards barbarism as is indicated in the suggestions of barbaric retaliation of which I have just spoken.  Civilisation in the best sense merely means the full authority of the human spirit over all externals.  Barbarism means the worship of those externals in their crude and unconquered state.  Barbarism means the worship of Nature; and in recent poetry, science, and philosophy there has been too much of the worship of Nature.  Wherever men begin to talk much and with great solemnity about the forces outside man, the note of it is barbaric.  When men talk much about heredity and environment they are almost barbarians.  The modern men of science are many of them almost