Ideal and disinterested motives are always to be reckoned with in human
nature. What the Germans call 'real politics', that is to say, politics
which treat disinterested motives as negligible, have led them into a
morass and have bogged them there. How easy it is to explain that the
British Empire depends on trade, that we are a nation of traders, that
all our policy is shaped by trade, that therefore it can only be
hypocrisy in us to pretend to any of the finer feelings. This is not,
as you might suppose, the harmless sally of a one-eyed wit; it is the
carefully reasoned belief of Germany's profoundest political thinkers.
They do not understand a cavalier, so they confidently assert that there
is no such thing in nature. That is a bad mistake to make about any
nation, but perhaps worst when it is made about the English, for the
cavalier temper in England runs through all classes. You can find it in
the schoolmaster, the small trader, the clerk, and the labourer, as
readily as in the officer of dragoons, or the Arctic explorer. The
Roundheads won the Civil War, and bequeathed to us their political
achievements.
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