Thus if a man were to say, "I love this woman, but I may some day
find my affinity in some other woman," he would be a Sentimentalist.
He would be saying, "I will eat my wedding-cake and keep it."
Or if a man should say, "I am a Republican, believing in
the equality of citizens; but when the Government has given
me my peerage I can do infinite good as a kind landlord and a
wise legislator"; then that man would be a Sentimentalist.
He would be trying to keep at the same time the classic austerity
of equality and also the vulgar excitement of an aristocrat.
Or if a man should say, "I am in favour of religious equality;
but I must preserve the Protestant Succession," he would be a
Sentimentalist of a grosser and more improbable kind.
This is the essence of the Sentimentalist: that he seeks to enjoy every
idea without its sequence, and every pleasure without its consequence.
Now it would really be hard to find a worse case of this inconsequent
sentimentalism than the theory of the British Empire advanced
by Mr. Roosevelt himself in his attack on Sentimentalists.
For the Imperial theory, the Roosevelt and Kipling theory, of our
relation to Eastern races is simply one of eating the Oriental cake
(I suppose a Sultana Cake) and at the same time leaving it alone.
Now there are two sane attitudes of a European statesman towards
Eastern peoples, and there are only two.
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