He may be a dashing and quite decent strategist. He may be a fine
romantic actor, like Burke flinging the dagger on the floor.
He may even (for all I know) be a sublime mystic, profoundly impressed
with the ancient meaning of the divine trade of the Carpenter,
and offering to the people a parable in the form of a ceremony.
All I wish to indicate is the abyss of mental confusion in
which such wild ritualism can be called "sound common sense."
And it is in that abyss of mental confusion, and in that alone,
that the new Imperialism lives and moves and has its being.
The whole glory and greatness of Mr. Chamberlain consists in this:
that if a man hits the right nail on the head nobody cares where he hits
it to or what it does. They care about the noise of the hammer, not about
the silent drip of the nail. Before and throughout the African war,
Mr. Chamberlain was always knocking in nails, with ringing decisiveness.
But when we ask, "But what have these nails held together?
Where is your carpentry? Where are your contented Outlanders?
Where is your free South Africa? Where is your British prestige?
What have your nails done?" then what answer is there?
We must go back (with an affectionate sigh) to our Pearson
for the answer to the question of what the nails have done:
"The speaker who hammered nails into a board won thousands of votes."

Now the whole of this passage is admirably characteristic of the new
journalism which Mr. Pearson represents, the new journalism which has
just purchased the Standard. To take one instance out of hundreds,
the incomparable man with the board and nails is described in the Pearson's
article as calling out (as he smote the symbolic nail), "Lie number one.
Nailed to the Mast! Nailed to the Mast!" In the whole office there
was apparently no compositor or office-boy to point out that we
speak of lies being nailed to the counter, and not to the mast.