their school curriculum any reference to
patriotism, any rudimentary conception of England as their sacred
heritage, and as they had been afforded no opportunity since they left
school of thinking of anything save their material welfare and grosser
material appetites, the vague talk of peril to the British Empire left
them unmoved. They were quite content to let others go and fight. They
had their own comfortable theories about it. Some fellows liked that
sort of thing. They themselves didn't. In ordinary times, it amused
that kind of fellow to belong to a Harriers Club, and clad in shorts
and zephyrs, go on Sundays for twenty-mile runs. It didn't amuse them.
A cigarette, a girl, and a stile formed their ideal of Sunday
enjoyment. They had no quarrel with the harrier fellow or the soldier
fellow for following his bent. They were most broad-minded. But they
flattered themselves that they were fellows of a superior and more
intelligent breed. They were making money and living warm, the only
ideal of existence of which they had ever heard, and what did anything
else matter?

If a man has never been taught that he has a country, how the deuce do
you expect him to love her--still less to defend her with his blood?
Our more than damnable governments for the last thirty years have done
everything in their power to crush in English hearts the national
spirit of England. God knows I have no quarrel with Scotland, Ireland,
and Wales. I speak in no disparagement of them. Quite the reverse. In
this war they have given freely of their blood. I only speak as an
Englishman of England, the great Mother of the Empire. Scot, Irishman,
Welshman, Canadian, Australian are filled with the pride of their
nationality. It is part of their being. Wisely they have been trained
to it from infancy. England, who is far bigger, far more powerful than
the whole lot of them put together--it's a statistical fact--has
deliberately sunk herself in her own esteem, in her own pride. Only one
great man has stood for England, as England, the great Mother, for the
last thirty years. And that man is Rudyard Kipling. And the Little Folk
in authority in England have spent their souls in rendering nugatory
his inspired message.

This criminal self-effacement of England is at the root of the peril of
the British Empire during this war.

I told you at the beginning that I did not know how to write a story.
You must forgive me for being led away into divagations