Chapter 16 - Page 2

fantastic flowers of cruelty and pride and lewdness and avarice.
The Caesarean environment makes the Caesar, as the special food
and the queenly cell make the queen bee. We differ from the bees
in so far that, given the proper food, they can be sure of making
a queen every time. With us there is no such certainty; out of
every ten men placed in the Caesarean environment one will be
temperamentally good, or intelligent, or great. The rest will
blossom into Caesars; he will not. Seventy and eighty years ago
simple-minded people, reading of the exploits of the Bourbons in
South Italy, cried out in amazement: To think that such things
should be happening in the nineteenth century! And a few years
since we too were astonished to find that in our still more
astonishing twentieth century, unhappy blackamoors on the Congo
and the Amazon were being treated as English serfs were treated
in the time of Stephen. To-day we are no longer surprised at
these things. The Black and Tans harry Ireland, the Poles
maltreat the Silesians, the bold Fascisti slaughter their poorer
countrymen: we take it all for granted. Since the war we wonder
at nothing. We have created a Caesarean environment and a host
of little Caesars has sprung up. What could be more natural?"

Mr. Scogan drank off what was left of his port and refilled the
glass.

At this very moment," he went on, "the most frightful horrors are
taking place in every corner of the world. People are being
crushed, slashed, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot
and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go
pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per
second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly
inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any
the less because of them? Most certainly we do not. We feel
sympathy, no doubt; we represent to ourselves imaginatively the
sufferings of nations and individuals and we deplore them. But,
after all, what are sympathy and imagination? Precious little,
unless the person for whom we feel sympathy happens to be closely
involved in our affections; and even then they don't go very far.
And a good thing too; for if one had an imagination vivid enough
and a sympathy sufficiently sensitive really to comprehend and to
feel the sufferings of other people, one would never have a
moment's peace of mind. A really sympathetic race would not so
much as know the meaning of happiness. But luckily, as I've
already said, we aren't a sympathetic race. At the beginning of
the war I used to think I really suffered, through imagination
and sympathy, with those who physically suffered. But after a
month or two I had to admit that, honestly, I didn't. And yet I