All the
mystery of the white man, all the fearful poetry of 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.
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