edominant nose.

The international situation exercised us greatly. Our meetings were
pervaded by the feeling that all things moved towards a day of
reckoning with Germany, and I was largely instrumental in keeping up
the suggestion that India was in a state of unstable equilibrium, that
sooner or later something must happen there--something very serious to
our Empire. Dayton frankly detested these topics. He was full of
that old Middle Victorian persuasion that whatever is inconvenient or
disagreeable to the English mind could be annihilated by not thinking
about it. He used to sit low in his chair and look mulish. "Militarism,"
he would declare in a tone of the utmost moral fervour, "is a curse.
It's an unmitigated curse." Then he would cough shortly and twitch his
head back and frown, and seem astonished beyond measure that after this
conclusive statement we could still go on talking of war.

All our Imperialists were obsessed by the thought of international
conflict, and their influence revived for a time those uneasinesses that
had been aroused in me for the first time by my continental journey
with Willersley and by Meredith's "One of Our Conquerors." That
quite justifiable dread of a punishment for all the slackness, mental
dishonesty, presumption, mercenary respectability and sentimentalised
commercialism of the Victorian period, at the hands of the better
organised, more vigorous, and now far more highly civilised peoples
of Central Europe, seemed to me to have both a good and bad series of
consequences. It seemed the only thing capable of bracing English minds
to education, sustained constructive effort and research; but on the
other hand it produced the quality of a panic, hasty preparation,
impatience of thought, a wasteful and sometimes quite futile immediacy.
In 1909, for example, there was a vast clamour for eight additional
Dreadnoughts--

"We want eight
And we won't wait,"

but no clamour at all about our national waste of inventive talent, our
mean standard of intellectual attainment, our disingenuous criticism,
and the consequent failure to distinguish men of the quality needed to
carry on the modern type of war. Almost universally we have the wrong
men in our places of responsibility and the right men in no place
at all, almost universally we have poorly qualified, hesitating, and
resentful subordinates, because our criticism is worthless and, so
habitually as to be now almost unconsci