, who easily get sea-sick after every rapid
movement--think, for instance, of the former Reichstag--we shall
certainly experience, as the first deep wave of the Revolution sinks
into us, an aristocratic, dynastic, and plutocratic Romanticism, a
yearning for the colour and glitter of the time of glory, a revolt
against the spiritless, mechanical philanthrophy of unemployed orators
of about fourth-form standard intellectually; against the monotonous
and insincere tirades of paid agitators and their restless disciples;
against laziness; ignorance, greed, and exaggeration masquerading as
popular scientific economy; and against the brutal and extortionate
upthrust from below. And so we shall arrive at the reverse kind of
folly, an admiration and bad imitation of foreign pride and pomp, an
arrogant individualism and a hardening of our human feeling. The
intellectual war profiteers, who are all for radicalism to-day, will
soon be wearing cornflowers[3] in their button-holes.

For the third time we shall see an illustration of the naive
shamelessness of the turn-coat. The spiritual process of conversion is
worth noticing; Paul was converted to be a converter. But the
scurrying of the intellectual speculator from the position which has
failed into the position which has won, with the full intention of
scurrying back again if necessary, and always with the claim to
instruct other people, is an expression of the alarming fact that life
has become not an affair of inward conviction, but of getting the
right tip.

The turn-coat movement began when a shortsighted crowd, incapable of
judgment, and with their minds clouded with a few cheap phrases,
expected from a quick and victorious war the strengthening of all the
elements of Force, and feared to be left stranded. Even the most
threadbare kind of liberalism appeared to be compromising, they
clamoured for "shining armour." The most wretched victims in soul and
body, who were obliged to flee forwards because they could not flee in
any other direction, were called heroes, and the manliest word in our
language, a word of which only the freest and the greatest are worthy,
was degraded. One who has experienced the hate and fury of the
turn-coats who poured contempt upon every word against the war and the
"great days," is unable to understand how a whole people can throw
its errors overboard without shame and sorrow--or he understands it
only too well. At this day we are being mocked and