Page:The Psychology of Jingoism.djvu/45

The craving for blood was first brought home to me in South Africa by the talk of certain shopkeepers from Bloemfontein, upon whom race lust had gained so strong a hold that they openly expressed their fears lest the Boers should give in before a sufficient number of them had been shot. This has remained throughout the prevalent tone of the British in South Africa; but of this passion there seemed some sufficient explanation from recent history and race contact. But that English men and women should of a sudden exhibit a fanatical desire to pierce and tear and hack the bodies of men whom they had never seen, and whose very name they hardly knew a year ago, is indeed an experience calculated to stagger any confidence one might have held in man as a rational and moral being. The 'comic spirit,' in its most sardonic mood, could find no more curiously suggestive material than the record of the pranks of British patriotism under the strain of this experience. Here, for instance, is an august person, the Lord Lieutenant of a county, addressing a body of moral and high-minded English gentlemen and ladies: –

Neither you nor I believe in these perpetual appeals to Providence in the wrong place and at the wrong time.