Victorian moralism to have softened British life and manners; to have created British civic virtue and self-discipline, and brought about standards of personal and public honesty unequalled in the world; to have rendered the law virtually self-enforcing; to have given the British their special sense of the dignity and liberty of the individual, and, as a corollary, their sense of the individual's personal responsibility. Yet it was exactly because British life itself was now so orderly, gentle, docile, safe and law-abiding, so decent, so founded on mutual trust that the British were less fitted to survive as a nation than their ancestors, whose characters had been formed in a coarse, tough and brutal society. For the British made the fundamental mistake, catastrophic in all its consequences, of exporting their romantic idealism and their evangelical morality into international relations... And so, in applying the qualities of gentleness, trustfulness, altruism and a strict regard for moral conduct to a sphere of human activity where cunning, cynicism, opportunism, trickery and force, all in the service of national self-interest, still held sway, the twentieth-century British stood disarmed and blinded by their own virtues." - Meaning and context.">
QuotesCosmos
p. 63
“

In terms of British society at home, this transformation of national character was wholly beneficent. It was a great achievement of Victorian moralism to have softened British life and manners; to have created British civic virtue and self-discipline, and brought about standards of personal and public honesty unequalled in the world; to have rendered the law virtually self-enforcing; to have given the British their special sense of the dignity and liberty of the individual, and, as a corollary, their sense of the individual's personal responsibility. Yet it was exactly because British life itself was now so orderly, gentle, docile, safe and law-abiding, so decent, so founded on mutual trust that the British were less fitted to survive as a nation than their ancestors, whose characters had been formed in a coarse, tough and brutal society. For the British made the fundamental mistake, catastrophic in all its consequences, of exporting their romantic idealism and their evangelical morality into international relations... And so, in applying the qualities of gentleness, trustfulness, altruism and a strict regard for moral conduct to a sphere of human activity where cunning, cynicism, opportunism, trickery and force, all in the service of national self-interest, still held sway, the twentieth-century British stood disarmed and blinded by their own virtues.

— Correlli Barnett

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "In terms of British society at home, this transformation of national character was wholly beneficent. It was a great achievement of Victorian moralism to have softened British life and manners; to have created British civic virtue and self-discipline, and brought about standards of personal and public honesty unequalled in the world; to have rendered the law virtually self-enforcing; to have given the British their special sense of the dignity and liberty of the individual, and, as a corollary, their sense of the individual's personal responsibility. Yet it was exactly because British life itself was now so orderly, gentle, docile, safe and law-abiding, so decent, so founded on mutual trust that the British were less fitted to survive as a nation than their ancestors, whose characters had been formed in a coarse, tough and brutal society. For the British made the fundamental mistake, catastrophic in all its consequences, of exporting their romantic idealism and their evangelical morality into international relations... And so, in applying the qualities of gentleness, trustfulness, altruism and a strict regard for moral conduct to a sphere of human activity where cunning, cynicism, opportunism, trickery and force, all in the service of national self-interest, still held sway, the twentieth-century British stood disarmed and blinded by their own virtues." in the context of "p. 63" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

Source: Wikiquote: "Correlli Barnett" (Quotes, 1970s, The Collapse of British Power (1972)) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 19, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app

Tags

#Correlli Barnett#british#national#personal#society#sense#life#twentiethcentury#transformation#selfdiscipline#responsibility#selfenforcing

About Correlli Barnett

Correlli Douglas Barnett (28 June 1927 – 10 July 2022) was an English military historian, who also wrote works of economic history, particularly on the United Kingdom's post-war "industrial decline".