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.
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