He had only a hasty but elaborate machinery for spreading the principles that he hadn't got.What he called his ideals were the dregs of a Darwinism which had already grown not only stagnant,but poisonous.That the fittest must survive,and that any one like himself must be the fittest;that the weakest must go to the wall,and that any one he could not understand must be the weakest;that was the philosophy which he lumberingly believed through life,like many another agnostic old bachelor of the Victorian era.All his views on religion (reverently quoted in the Review of Reviews)were simply the stalest ideas of his time.It was not his fault,poor fellow,that he called a high hill somewhere in South Africa "his church."It was not his fault,I mean,that he could not see that a church all to oneself is not a church at all.
It is a madman's cell.It was not his fault that he "figured out that God meant as much of the planet to be Anglo-Saxon as possible."Many evolutionists much wiser had "figured out"things even more babyish.He was an honest and humble recipient of the plodding popular science of his time;he spread no ideas that any cockney clerk in Streatham could not have spread for him.But it was exactly because he had no ideas to spread that he invoked slaughter,violated justice,and ruined republics to spread them.
But the case is even stronger and stranger.Fashionable Imperialism not only has no ideas of its own to extend;but such ideas as it has are actually borrowed from the brown and black peoples to whom it seeks to extend them.The Crusading kings and knights might be represented as seeking to spread Western ideas in the East.But all that our Imperialist aristocrats could do would be to spread Eastern ideas in the East.For that very governing class which urges Occidental Imperialism has been deeply discoloured with Oriental mysticism and Cosmology.