Politics & Power Quote by J. G. Stedman

A soldier’s compliment that lands like an indictment: Stedman frames friendship as merit-based, then immediately reveals how rarely merit shows up where it’s most loudly advertised. The hinge is “actions best correspond with their doctrine” - a blunt standard of integrity - followed by the quiet dagger of “pretend most to civilization.” “Civilization” here isn’t a neutral label; it’s a costume nations wear to excuse what they do to people they’ve decided don’t count.

Stedman wrote in an era when European empires sold themselves as enlightened projects while running economies on slavery, extraction, and punitive violence. In that light, his phrasing reads as field-report skepticism: the man who has seen what lofty language looks like on paper, and what it looks like when enforced at gunpoint. The sentence performs that disillusionment formally. It begins with a courteous “profess myself” - the etiquette of the educated gentleman - and ends by undercutting the gentleman’s favorite myth, that “civilized” powers behave civilly.

The subtext is less “be consistent” than “stop using ideals as alibis.” He’s not praising doctrine; he’s treating it as a trapdoor. If you claim a moral creed, you’ve handed observers a measuring stick. Stedman’s allegiance, he suggests, is to coherence over identity: he’ll side with whoever lives their stated principles, even if they’re outside the club of “civilization.” That’s a radical posture for an imperial world built on the opposite assumption: that the rhetoric of virtue is itself proof of virtue.