International policy - 1866 Author:Richard Congreve Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: No. IV. ENGLAND AND INDIA. E. H. PEMBER. ENGLAND AND INDIA. Along "with the growth of a sense of duty among the western nations of Europe is slackene... more »d or quickened the progress of the world. We claim to be no more than what we are,—at the head of the human race; and it is vital to the universal interest that we should acknowledge the full meaning of our preeminence. To feel a noble exultation, not in the privileges, but in the responsibilities of power; to replace a reckless and anarchical acquisitiveness by the more orderly and just hopes of an unselfish communion; to rise from the level of Cortez and Pizarro, to do far more even for the wealth of Europe than they did, while we educate and retain the races and systems which it was the cynical boast of the disciples of that bad old school that they improved by extirpation; to lay aside direct self-interest; to forego rights for duties; to appeal for companionship to less advanced societies, more nobly and more effectively than by brute force and obstinate high-handedness; to invite, not to teri'ify; to repair the misdeeds of the past, and to beat back its traditions of evil-doing from the future; to universalise European ideas, and to unify civilisation, if that be to be done, by giving to our physical and scientific superiority the sanction of moral order and restraint;— such are some of the resolves which the mind of Western Europe should learn to form as it contemplates its own position, and what it has done and what it may yet do over the outer area of the world. The self-confidence of race is majestic, but the egoism of race is contemptible, and the step that leads from one to the other is perilously short. The first assumes primacy and dispenses blessing; the second arrogates empire, begetting vice and infl...« less