Democracy's Retreats: Imperial Mongering from Gladstone to "King George"

William Gladstone, the on-again, off-again British prime minister for most of the second half of the 19 th century, famously liked to walk the streets at night, counseling prostitutes to a more wholesome life. He did so when he was young. He did so when he was old, and through his four terms as prime minister from 1868 through 1894. Those were the years when Britain thought itself Queen Victoria’s and God’s gift to the world (in that order), when the sun never set on the Union Jack, when imperialism found cover behind the infomercial known, then as now, as the white man’s burden. The link between Gladstone ’s streetwalking and Britain ’s globe-trotting is one of those striking historic parallels between a man’s ideals personifying a civilization’s presumptions. The link isn’t just symbolic. It betrays the rot at the heart of western assumptions about right and wrong, about who, your majesty, the savages are. For Gladstone wasn’t a compulsive streetwalker for virtue all those years: He was, in fact, an assiduous whoremonger. He makes you think of that old hair club commercial — “I’m not just the president, I’m a customer.” And Britain wasn’t bringing civilization to the world so much as decimating and retarding it where it didn’t fit with Albion ’s tastes. It wasn’t called perfidious for nothing. Read the rest...