Page:A Miscellany of Men.djvu/52
A Miscellany of Men
way house in this matter; it must be green or red. We wish to see every honest Englishman one colour or the other." And then some funny man in the popular Press will star the sentence with a pun, and say that the Daily Mail liked its readers to be green and its paper to be read. But no one will even dare to whisper that there is such a thing as yellow. ·····
For the purposes of pure logic it is clearer to argue with silly examples than with sensible ones: because silly examples are simple. But I could give many grave and concrete cases of the kind of thing to which I refer. In the later part of the Boer War both parties perpetually insisted in every speech and pamphlet that annexation was inevitable and that it was only a question whether Liberals or Tories should do it. It was not inevitable in the least; it would have been perfectly easy to make peace with the Boers as Christian nations commonly make peace with their conquered enemies. Personally I think that it would have been better for us in the most selfish sense, better for our pocket and prestige, if we had never effected the
42