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The Psychology of Jingoism

Two years ago most Englishmen would have asserted confidently that England, though engaged in a war to break down 'a corrupt oligarchy' in the Transvaal, had so much nobility of nature that she could admire the stubborn resistance of a handful of farmers fighting for the independence of their country, and that even in the act of war our sympathies would have flowed in the direction of a generous treatment of such a foe. What do we find? When the policy of wholesale devastation carried out by British troops over large districts, the burning of farms, looting of cattle, cutting down of fruit trees, and breaking of dams is announced to the nation, it awakes in the mob-mind no other feeling than one of grim satisfaction, expressed by the usual comment, 'Serve them right; they shouldn't have begun the war!' No shame whatever is felt for the wanton and futile brutality of such a course, for the flagrant breaches of the very canons of 'civilized warfare' which we as a nation had imposed upon the Conferences of the Powers – nothing but a chuckle of savage satisfaction in the common man, a brief irrelevant, 'Yes, war is brutal!' in the more 'civilized' Jingo!

How far brutality is capable of carrying the

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