Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 9.pdf/335

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RACE IN UTOPIA

It is a little doubtful whether the races lacking "in the elementary qualities of social efficiency" are expected to acquire them under the chastening hands of those races which, through "strength and energy of character, humanity, probity, and integrity, and a single-minded devotion to conceptions of duty," are developing "the resources of the richest regions of the earth" over their heads, or whether this is the ultimate ideal.

Next comes the rather incoherent alternative that one associates in England with official Liberalism.

Liberalism in England is not quite the same thing as Liberalism in the rest of the world; it is woven of two strands. There is Whiggism, the powerful tradition of seventeenth-century Protestant and republican England, with its great debt to republican Rome, its strong constructive and disciplinary bias, its broad and originally very living and intelligent outlook; and interwoven with this there is the sentimental and logical Liberalism that sprang from the stresses of the eighteenth century, that finds its early scarce differentiated expression in Harrington's "Oceana," and after fresh draughts of the tradition of Brutus and Cato and some elegant trifling with noble savages, budded in "La Cité Morellyste," flowered in the emotional democratic naturalism of Rousseau, and bore abundant fruit in the French Revolution. These are two very distinct strands. Directly they were freed in America from the grip of conflict with British Toryism, they came apart as the Republican and Democratic parties respectively. Their continued union in Great Britain is a political acci-

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