itling?

Mr. Britling sat up in his bed and beat at the bedclothes with his
fists. He uttered uncompleted vows, "From this hour forth ... from this
hour forth...."

He must do something, he felt. At any rate he had his experiences. He
could warn. He could explain away. Perhaps he might help to extricate,
if things had got to that pitch.

Should he write to his son? For a time he revolved a long, tactful
letter in his mind. But that was impossible. Suppose the trouble was
something quite different? It would have to be a letter in the most
general terms....

Section 6

It was in the doubly refracting nature of Mr. Britling's mind that while
he was deploring his inefficiency in regard to his son, he was also
deploring the ineffectiveness of all his generation of parents. Quite
insensibly his mind passed over to the generalised point of view.

In his talks with Mr. Direck, Mr. Britling could present England as a
great and amiable spectacle of carelessness and relaxation, but was it
indeed an amiable spectacle? The point that Mr. Direck had made about
the barn rankled in his thoughts. His barn was a barn no longer, his
farmyard held no cattle; he was just living laxly in the buildings that
ancient needs had made, he was living on the accumulated prosperity of
former times, the spendthrift heir of toiling generations. Not only was
he a pampered, undisciplined sort of human being; he was living in a
pampered, undisciplined sort of community. The two things went
together.... This confounded Irish business, one could laugh at it in
the daylight, but was it indeed a thing to laugh at? We were drifting
lazily towards a real disaster. We had a government that seemed guided
by the principles of Mr. Micawber, and adopted for its watchword "Wait
and see." For months now this trouble had grown more threatening.
Suppose presently that civil war broke out in Ireland! Suppose presently
that these irritated, mishandled suffragettes did some desperate
irreconcilable thing, assassinated for example! The bomb in Westminster
Abbey the other day might have killed a dozen people.... Suppose the
smouldering criticism of British rule in India and Egypt were fanned by
administrative indiscretions into a flame....

And then suppose Germany had made trouble....

Usually Mr. Britling kept his mind off Germany. In the daytime he
pretended Germany meant nothing to England. He hated alarmists. He hated
disagreeable possibilities. He declared