It does not seize the first fact of impression,as that a man is obviously a sailor or a Jew or a drunkard or a gentleman or a nigger or an albino or a prize-fighter or an imbecile or an American.These are the realities by which the people really recognise each other.They are almost always left out of the inquiry.,THE SULTANThere is one deep defect in our extension of cosmopolitan and Imperial cultures.That is,that in most human things if you spread your butter far you spread it thin.But there is an odder fact yet:rooted in something dark and irrational in human nature.That is,that when you find your butter thin,you begin to spread it.And it is just when you find your ideas wearing thin in your own mind that you begin to spread them among your fellow-creatures.It is a paradox;but not my paradox.
There are numerous cases in history;but I think the strongest case is this.That we have Imperialism in all our clubs at the very time when we have Orientalism in all our drawing-rooms.
I mean that the colonial ideal of such men as Cecil Rhodes did not arise out of any fresh creative idea of the Western genius,it was a fad,and like most fads an imitation.For what was wrong with Rhodes was not that,like Cromwell or Hildebrand,he made huge mistakes,nor even that he committed great crimes.It was that he committed these crimes and errors in order to spread certain ideas.And when one asked for the ideas they could not be found.Cromwell stood for Calvinism,Hildebrand for Catholicism:but Rhodes had no principles whatever to give to the world.