ABSTRACT
The topic of 'Shall We Be Missionaries?' is not religion but imperialism, and Strachey wrote it while he was working on his dissertation on Warren Hastings. G. E. Moore is as unhelpful as the imperialists themselves, however, and Strachey offers a series of reflections on the ethics of imperialism from what appears to be, finally, a sympathetic perspective. Rosenbaum argues that this paper 'displays a noticeable diminishment of the imperial argument for civilisation that Strachey had followed elsewhere'. Merle points out only that it considers the usefulness of Principia Ethica in addressing the question of the moral desirability or undesirability of imperialism. Their utopia is an enormous Cambridge a judicious mixture of Cambridge and McTaggart's heaven. Strachey seems to tend towards the life of action and, therefore, towards empire, and away from the life of intellectual pursuits which he associates with a complacent Little Englandism. Exactly the same difficulty meets one in relation to the ethics of international politics.
