are upon him. He marches away to the waving of flags and the applause of
multitudes. Children cheer him, women embrace him, old men bless him. If
he is wounded, he is tenderly cared for by the nation. If he performs
some gallant deed, he is rewarded by orders of merit, and perhaps by the
gift of the Victoria Cross. If he dies, he is buried amid sounding
eulogies and commemorated by statues and inscriptions. "Victory, or
Westminster Abbey," cried Lord Nelson as he sailed into the battle of
Trafalgar. And similar, to the degree of humble deserts, is the cry of
every soldier or sailor who takes up arms for his country. For the
moment he is the symbol of the nation. He embodies within his own single
person the hopes and praises of an entire people. He lives, and, if he
dies, he dies in the good opinion of mankind. And I can tell you that
nothing makes life so smooth and death so comparatively simple as this
good opinion of which I speak. The hardest suffering seems easy, and the
most untimely death not altogether unwelcome, if only we can know that
all men are our friends, and we live or die with their blessings upon
our heads. "A good name," says the preacher, "is better than precious
ointment"; and again he declares, "A good name is better than riches."
By which he means, I take it, that there is nothing in the outer world,
however desirable in itself, which can give us compensation for the
loss of favor of mankind.

Now we begin to get just a glimpse, at least, of a nobler and rarer type
of heroism than that of the soldier, when we look upon the man who, in
obedience to some inner impulse of the soul, deliberately alienates
himself from the sympathy and the applause of his fellows. Such a man
must be regarded as a kind of pioneer or explorer, who goes into the
solitudes not of the physical but of the spiritual realm, there to blaze
new trails, and, perhaps like Captain Scott, to die alone. A striking
example of heroism of this kind, presented in exact antithesis to the
ordinary heroism of the soldier, may be found in John Galsworthy's play,
The Mob. At first accepted only as a brilliant piece of imagination, the
drama becomes charged with real significance when we learn that its
action is a more or less exact reproduction of the situation which was
precipitated in England during the Boer War by Lloyd-George and his
famous "Stop-the-War party." The story of the play, and to a large
extent of English history in 1899, is t