Life & Wisdom Quote by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hopkins isn’t praising the British Empire so much as quarantining its one redeemable export: a moral style. The line turns on that sly, almost offhand opener - "By the by" - as if the claim is casual, even obvious. But it’s a rhetorical feint. He sets up an enormous conditional ("if... had done nothing else") that quietly acknowledges the darker ledger of English power, then offers a single counterweight: "the notion of a gentleman". The compliment arrives with a shadow attached.

What makes it work is how "notion" does double duty. It’s not the gentleman as a real person (Hopkins would have had ample reason to doubt that), but as an idea: a social technology for restraint, honor, and self-command. Hopkins, a Jesuit convert writing in a period when Victorian Britain was busy moralizing its own dominance, isolates gentility as a cultural concept that might outlive politics. The phrase "great service to mankind" sounds grand, but the construction implies scarcity: one service, not a catalog of achievements.

Subtextually, he’s measuring national legacy by ethical imagination rather than conquest. A "gentleman" is a role you perform under pressure; it promises that power can be tempered by conduct. That’s both an aspiration and an indictment: if the best defense of "the English race" is an exported ideal of decency, then decency is precisely what history keeps putting in doubt. Hopkins grants the culture its most flattering self-image while making you notice how badly it needs that alibi.