“recollect” our true best selves in the very moment of action, how far there has been given to us that saving grace of a storm-tost nation, “l’art de porter en soi le remède de ses propres défauts.”

Every race, doubtless, has its own special weaknesses and delusions, the “idols” of its patriotic “cave,” and it is a commonplace of history that the moral, physical, or intellectual “decadence” of one age is revived and actualized by the material cataclysm of another.

And the readiness, spiritual and material, of the nation in utrumque paratus is the index of its harmony with its environment.

On the other hand there are wars to be fully prepared for which would almost mean to be a partner in their criminality. There is an attitude of defence which, if successful, would lose all dignity were it allied with a permanent distrust in the morality and humanity of other nations.

[Pg x]

[Pg x]

If only an inhuman pride could be free from uneasiness at such a moment, at least warm encouragement comes to us ab extra. Whatever our weaknesses now, our sins or blunders in the past, no historian will question the motive, nay, the severe moral effort with which the English nation enters upon this war of the ages.

It is scarcely conceivable that any people could be called upon to make a greater or more sudden exhibition of—their peculiar qualities.

What will be the verdict upon our own? That we are wilfully misunderstood, misrepresented, must matter little to us, if we have the moral support of a public opinion which will, if we triumph, be more powerful for good than ever before.

Nor need we fear its ultimate perversion by interested slander. The hostile demonstrations of the German intellect during the early stages of this war have scarcely been on a par with those of its material force.

One of the latest of sophistical Imperialist ebullitions complains with somewhat forced pathos of our waging war with our former allies of Waterloo!

But we did not fight the French then because they were French, nor ally ourselves with Prussians because they spoke a guttural tongue. We fought then, as now, against the erection of an impossible and unbearable European tyranny, the local origin and nationality of which would[Pg xi] have been quite immaterial to the main question.

 Prev. P 4/53 next