Kindergarten Politics

John Buchan’s dashing adventurer Sandy Arbuthnot didn’t think much of foreign policy after the Great War.

1924

King George V 1910-1936

Introduction

John Buchan was not only a writer of entertaining adventure tales, but a Governor General of Canada and a first-rate military historian. Here, he gives his take on the break-up of the Ottoman Empire after the Great War through his dashing hero Sandy Arbuthnot.

SANDY was furious about the muddle in the Near East and the mishandling of Turkey. His view was that we were doing our best to hammer a much-divided Orient into a hostile unanimity.

“Lord!” he cried, “how I loathe our new manners in foreign policy. The old English way was to regard all foreigners as slightly childish and rather idiotic and ourselves as the only grown-ups in a kindergarten world.

“That meant that we had a cool detached view and did even-handed unsympathetic justice. But now we have got into the nursery ourselves and are bear-fighting on the floor. We take violent sides, and make pets, and of course if you are -phil something or other you have got to be -phobe something else. It is all wrong.”

From ‘The Three Hostages’ by John Buchan
Questions for Critics

1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?

2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?

3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?

Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.

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