What's Wrong with the WorldChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Philosophy
What's Wrong with the World
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Social problems
conveniences or inconveniences, could have been created by people
particularly fond of truth?
The very English happiness on this point is itself a hypocrisy. When a
man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself
is a liar. David said in his haste, that is, in his honesty, that
all men are liars. It was afterwards, in some leisurely official
explanation, that he said the Kings of Israel at least told the truth.
When Lord Curzon was Viceroy he delivered a moral lecture to the Indians
on their reputed indifference to veracity, to actuality and intellectual
honor. A great many people indignantly discussed whether orientals
deserved to receive this rebuke; whether Indians were indeed in a
position to receive such severe admonition. No one seemed to ask, as I
should venture to ask, whether Lord Curzon was in a position to give
it. He is an ordinary party politician; a party politician means a
politician who might have belonged to either party. Being such a person,
he must again and again, at every twist and turn of party strategy,
either have deceived others or grossly deceived himself. I do not know
the East; nor do I like what I know. I am quite ready to believe that
when Lord Curzon went out he found a very false atmosphere. I only say
it must have been something startlingly and chokingly false if it was
falser than that English atmosphere from which he came. The English
Parliament actually cares for everything except veracity. The
public-school man is kind, courageous, polite, clean, companionable;
but, in the most awful sense of the words, the truth is not in him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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