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.
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