It is the same throughout. Want of imagination makes people exaggerate
the difficulties and dangers of every new scheme, because they can't
picture constructively to themselves the details of its working. Men
with great picturing power, like Shelley or Robespierre, are always very
advanced Radicals, and potentially revolutionists. The difficulty _they_
see is not the difficulty of making the thing work, but the difficulty
of convincing less clear-headed people of its desirability and
practicability. A great many Conservatives, who are Conservative from
selfishness, would be Radicals if only they could feel for themselves
that even their own petty interests and pleasures are not really
menaced. The squires and the dukes can't realise how much happier even
they would be in a free, a beautiful, and a well-organised community.
Imaginative minds can picture a world where everything is so ordered
that life comes as a constant aesthetic delight to everybody. They know
that that world could be realised to-morrow--if only all others could
picture it to themselves as vividly as they do. But they also know that
it can only be attained in the end by long ages of struggle, and by slow
evolution of the essentially imaginative ethical faculty. For right
action depends most of all, in the last resort, upon a graphic
conception of the feelings of others.
XX.
_ABOUT ABROAD._
The place known as Abroad is not nearly so nice a country to live in as
England. The people who inhabit Abroad are called Foreigners. They are
in every way and at all times inferior to Englishmen.
These Post-Prandials used once to be provided with a sting in their
tail, like the common scorpion. By way of change, I turn them out now
with a sting in their head, like the common mosquito. Mosquitoes are
much less dangerous than scorpions, but they're a deal more irritating.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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