ABSTRACT
Lord Salisbury, leader of the British Conservative Party for the last two decades of the nineteenth century and chancellor of Oxford, among many other political accomplishments, was three times prime minister between 1885 and 1902. Strachey presumably wrote this dialogue after Salisbury's death in 1903, and probably after Strachey's fellowship dissertation was finally rejected in 1905 and his attitude towards imperialism had begun to shift towards vehement opposition. In this clash of Epicureanism and Christianity, Strachey suggests the absurdity of Christian dogma in order to undercut both Salisbury's own ideological commitments as an icon of Victorian aristocratic conservatism and, more broadly, any theological justification for imperialism as such, Victorian or otherwise. The vagaries of the multitude – however absurd, however egregious – do indeed possess a profound significance for the statesman and the philosopher. The mind and the soul, being the product of the friction of atomic particles, when that friction ceases themselves no longer exist.
