[79] He does not add: And so did my fathers two hundred years ago, and all Europe and the Bible expresses faith in them; "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, says God"; for this kind of Englishman is not of a discerning and analytical disposition. He never goes farther than the matter in hand; and the matter in his own hands seldom stretches farther than the length of his own nose. But what does it mean when we come to analyse it? Is it not simply that deference which the less developed and more brutalized part of our nation, aye, and of the separate individual himself, pays to the higher? Is it not that the English nation and English individual, bent on an act of injustice at variance with the most deep-lying conviction of its nature, is obliged to gloss it over or it could not attain its end? If the French or Chinese or Russian Government is not obliged to gloss over the fact to the mass of its people that in undertaking a certain war it is thinking nothing of justice or injustice, not the benefit of the conquered, but simply of itself; is it not because there is no large body of the people strong enough to hamper it and perhaps tie its hands altogether if it did not cozen and blind them? What is the action of the English Government under such conditions, when Pitt drags in the words justice, right, mercy, to shield itself, but a covert assertion that such a feeling does exist, which would not stand by it if it did not believe that the freedom and emancipation of others would be aided by its action? Nay, in the meanest souled Englishwoman, when she dare not say to herself openly: "I hate that woman and I will wrong her," but is obliged to bring in the blasphemed words duty, right, justice, to soothe her own soul--what is it but a testimony that, even in that poor specimen of the race, there lurks somewhere a feeling that right must be done, that for no gain to _yourself_ can you take an unfair advantage. It is the low, insincere element in the woman striving to justify itself before the profound English conception of the absolute necessity of justice and fair play between all men. She _dare_ not slander her fellow unless she has first silenced this.