g of ballast, the Germans, very politely but firmly overcame
his scruples by shooting his balloon again twice.

CHAPTER IV. THE GERMAN AIR-FLEET

1

Of all the productions of the human imagination that make the world in
which Mr. Bert Smallways lived confusingly wonderful, there was none
quite so strange, so headlong and disturbing, so noisy and persuasive
and dangerous, as the modernisations of patriotism produced by imperial
and international politics. In the soul of all men is a liking for kind,
a pride in one's own atmosphere, a tenderness for one's Mother speech
and one's familiar land. Before the coming of the Scientific Age
this group of gentle and noble emotions had been a fine factor in the
equipment of every worthy human being, a fine factor that had its less
amiable aspect in a usually harmless hostility to strange people, and a
usually harmless detraction of strange lands. But with the wild rush of
change in the pace, scope, materials, scale, and possibilities of human
life that then occurred, the old boundaries, the old seclusions and
separations were violently broken down. All the old settled mental
habits and traditions of men found themselves not simply confronted by
new conditions, but by constantly renewed and changing new conditions.
They had no chance of adapting themselves. They were annihilated or
perverted or inflamed beyond recognition.

Bert Smallways' grandfather, in the days when Bun Hill was a village
under the sway of Sir Peter Bone's parent, had "known his place" to
the uttermost farthing, touched his hat to his betters, despised and
condescended to his inferiors, and hadn't changed an idea from the
cradle to the grave. He was Kentish and English, and that meant hops,
beer, dog-rose's, and the sort of sunshine that was best in the world.
Newspapers and politics and visits to "Lunnon" weren't for the likes of
him. Then came the change. These earlier chapters have given an idea of
what happened to Bun Hill, and how the flood of novel things had poured
over its devoted rusticity. Bert Smallways was only one of countless
millions in Europe and America and Asia who, instead of being born
rooted in the soil, were born struggling in a torrent they never clearly
understood. All the faiths of their fathers had been taken by surprise,
and startled into the strangest forms and reactions. Particularly did
the fine old tradition of patriotism get perverted and distorted in the
rush of the new ti