Page:The Psychology of Jingoism.djvu/91

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CHAPTER VI

THE INEVITABLE IN POLITICS

The crude form of religious superstition, the reversion to belief in 'England's God,' a barbarian tribal deity who fights with and for our big battalions, has already been sufficiently described. It remains, however, to direct attention to a quasi-philosophic superstition invoked to aid and abet our aggressive policy.

The doctrine of 'the inevitable' is not new, nor is it confined to the larger issues of public life. A mere child learns the early practice of discriminating its responsibility for success and failure, imputing to itself as a personal merit anything that turns out well, explaining a failure, a mistake, a sin, by reference to the inherent 'cussedness' of external things. What teacher is not familiar with the naïve distinction, "I got this sum right, but the other one would come wrong"? The same sense of destiny, marked by an utter repudiation of personal responsibility, is illustrated by the theory

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