Oh sure, post-Edwardian Britain was such a Libertarian paradise! That is, unless you were an industrial worker in the massive sweatshops of Manchester and Birmingham, or a tenant farmer tending the fields of some decadent and corrupt land owner. It was such a glorious Elysian Field of Plenty that anyone who could scrape up a steerage ticket was getting out of Dodge and heading for the colonies or New York.

And who paid for this turn of the century paradise? The toil and servitude of hundreds of millions of little brown people in the Empire who provided the cheap labor, raw material, domestic unemployment and foreign markets that supported the insatiable parasitic class that profited from this outrage.

Of course, in order to maintain this pyramid of privilege was the phenomenally expensive Royal Navy, and the Thin Red Line, ready to pay the price in blood and money to keep the wogs and fuzzy-wuzzies in line and docile so they could glory in the beneficence of Perfidious Albion. Rule Britannia! Britons never, never, never will be slaves! No, but they will have to endure the most pernicious social and economic class system in Europe.

And who paid for this enormous colonial apparatus? Those same law abiding Englishmen (and how about the Irish, Welsh and Scots, eh? ESPECIALLY the Irish!).

Of course, other European powers also had their colonial ambitions, and when they threatened England's Libertarian paradise they had to be stopped tout de suite! So all the horrors Mr Taylor catalogs for us so minutely in his fawning little ode had to be inflicted on the sturdy English yeomanry (not to mention all those smelly colonials too) in order to defend English class and moneyed interests (you will note I, like Taylor, said English, not British, there is a difference) against the threat from Germany's class and moneyed interests and imperialist ambitions.

You've obviously been reading way too much Kipling, Tom. I suggest instead you should try an antidote: check out George Orwell's essay on Rudyard,

http://gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/Orwell-B.htm

I know you like Orwell, the great English Socialist you love to quote when it suits your twisted world view, but conveniently ignore when he exposes it for the vulgar farce it really is.