Are We Hypocrites?

And now I proceed from general considerations to the diplomatic history of the present case, as I must in order to make our moral position clear.  But first, lest I should lose all credit by the startling incompatibility between the familiar personal character of our statesmen and the proceedings for which they are officially responsible, I must say a word about the peculiar psychology of English statesmanship, not only for the benefit of my English readers (who do not know that it is peculiar just as they do not know that water has any taste because it is always in their mouths), but as a plea for a more charitable construction from the wider world.

We know by report, however unjust it may seem to us, that there is an opinion abroad, even in the quarters most friendly to us, that our excellent qualities are marred by an incorrigible hypocrisy.  To France we have always been Perfidious Albion.  In Germany, at this moment, that epithet would be scorned as far too flattering to us.  Victor Hugo explained the relative unpopularity of Measure for Measure among Shakespeare’s plays on the ground that the character of the hypocrite Angelo was a too faithful dramatization of our national character.  Pecksniff is not considered so exceptional an English gentleman in America as he is in England.

Now we have not acquired this reputation for nothing.  The world has no greater interest in branding England with this particular vice of hypocrisy than in branding France with it; yet the world does not cite Tartuffe as a typical Frenchman as it cites Angelo and Pecksniff as typical Englishmen.  We may protest against it as indignantly as the Prussian soldiers protest against their equally universal reputation for ferocity in plunder and pillage, sack and rapine; but there is something in it.  If you judge an English statesman, by his conscious intentions, his professions, and his personal charm, you will often find him an amiable, upright, humane, anxiously truthful man.  If you judge him, as a foreigner must, solely on the official acts for which he is responsible, and which he has to defend in the House of Commons for the sake of his party, you will often be driven to conclude that this estimable gentleman is, in point of being an unscrupulous superprig and fool, worse than Caesar Borgia and General Von Bernhardi rolled into one, and in foreign affairs a Bismarck in everything except commanding ability, blunt common sense, and freedom from illusion as to the nature and object of his own diplomacy.  And the permanent officials in whose hands he is will probably deserve all that and something to spare.  Thus you will get that amazing contrast that confronts us now between the Machiavellian Sir Edward Grey of the Berlin newspapers and the amiable and popular Sir Edward Grey we know in England.  In England we are all prepared to face any World Congress and say, “We know that Sir Edward Grey is an honest