uncivilised, to encroach to their own profit, until at last the veil which is now before the eyes of the public in England will be torn away, and they will find themselves suddenly called upon to abandon the parochial details over which they have been wrangling, for sterner work. It will be too late then to regret the penny-wise and pound-foolish policy which plunged them into the mess: the only question they will have to consider is, whether it is not too late to get out of it."
"I am a good deal surprised," I remarked, after having listened to the unflattering utterances of my friend with some dissatisfaction, "that you entirely ignore all other considerations than those of mere policy and expediency. Granting, as you say, that the present policy of England imperils its commercial ascendancy, are no other considerations to be allowed to guide the policy of a nation than those connected with its pocket? Have we no moral duties to perform, no example to set, no principles to maintain? Or are we ever to remain a nation of shopkeepers, fighting unscrupulously for markets; grabbing the territory of savages, under the pretext of civilising them, which is usually accomplished by the process of extermination; and jostling all other comers out of the markets of the world by fair means or foul? Because these means served us some centuries ago, and because, if you will, our national greatness is built upon them, does it follow that we should cling to them in these more enlightened days? If the moral instinct of the people of England begins to revolt against them, even to the prejudice of the national purse, do our money-bags constitute a sufficient reason why we should remain in the Cimmerian darkness and brutality of the middle ages? Of all men you were the last whom I expected to hear confound moral progress with political imbecility."
"Nay," returned Ivan, "I should be the first to congratulate you on a policy of moral progress, if, in that pursued at present by England, I could discover it. What moral progress is there in a policy which has resulted in the slaughter of thousands of unhappy Arabs in Egypt and the Eastern Soudan? Where does moral progress show itself in the expedition which has worked its weary way into the heart of Africa, to fight against the naked savages there? Where is the moral progress of a policy which has necessitated another military expedition to South Africa, and new annexations of territory there? What moral progress have you achieved in Turkey, where you are bound by treaty to institute reforms in that part of the empire over which you are supposed by the same treaty to exercise a protectorate, the very existence of which, under the policy of moral progress, it has been found convenient to ignore, because it involves responsibilities towards an oppressed and suffering people, whose oppression and whose sufferings it would now be expensive and troublesome to recognise, though political capital enough is made out of them when the exigencies of your local party warfare demand it? The question is, In what does real moral progress consist? Certainly not in the blatant profession of moral platitudes – the abstract truth of which everybody recognises – when they are accompanied by a practice which gives them the lie direct. There can be nothing more demoralising to the moral welfare of a nation than a policy which is in flagrant contradiction to its lofty moral preten-
