rpetual fairy-tale,
because I have forgotten all about it. The lamp-post which moves
him to a tear of reminiscence wrings from me a cry of astonishment;
and the wall which to him is as historic as a pyramid is to me
as arresting and revolutionary as a barricade. Now in this,
I am glad to say, my temperament is very English; and the difference
is very typical of the two functions of the English and the French.
But in practical politics the French have a certain advantage in knowing
where they are, and knowing it is where they have been before.
It is in the Roman Empire.

The position of the English in Egypt or even in Palestine is something
of a paradox. The real English claim is never heard in England and never
uttered by Englishmen. We do indeed hear a number of false English
claims, and other English claims that are rather irrelevant than false.
We hear pompous and hypocritical suggestions, full of that which so
often accompanies the sin of pride, the weakness of provinciality.
We hear suggestions that the English alone can establish anywhere
a reign of law, justice, mercy, purity and all the rest of it.
We also hear franker and fairer suggestions that the English
have after all (as indeed they have) embarked on a spirited
and stirring adventure; and that there has been a real romance
in the extending of the British Empire in strange lands.
But the real case for these semi-eastern occupations is not
that of extending the British Empire in strange lands.
Rather it is restoring the Roman Empire in familiar lands.
It is not merely breaking out of Europe in the search
for something non-European. It would be much truer to call
it putting Europe together again after it had been broken.
It may almost be said of the Britons, considered as the most
western of Europeans, that they have so completely forgotten
their own history that they have forgotten even their own rights.
At any rate they have forgotten the claims that could reasonably be
made for them, but which they never think of making for themselves.
They have not the faintest notion, for instance, of why hundreds of years
ago an English saint was taken from Egypt, or why an English king
was fighting in Palestine. They merely have a vague idea that George
of Cappadocia was naturalised much in the same way as George of Hanover.
They almost certainly suppose that Coeur de Lion in his wanderings
happened to meet the King of Egypt, as Captain Cook might happen
to mee