the idea of a whole vast nation
waiting to strike at us incredible. Why should they? You cannot have
seventy million lunatics.... But in the darkness of the night one cannot
dismiss things in this way. Suppose, after all, their army was more
than a parade, their navy more than a protest?

We might be caught--It was only in the vast melancholia of such
occasions that Mr. Britling would admit such possibilities, but we might
be caught by some sudden declaration of war.... And how should we face
it?

He recalled the afternoon's talk at Claverings and such samples of our
governmental machinery as he chanced to number among his personal
acquaintance. Suppose suddenly the enemy struck! With Raeburn and his
friends to defend us! Or if the shock tumbled them out of power, then
with these vituperative Tories, these spiteful advocates of weak
tyrannies and privileged pretences in the place of them. There was no
leadership in England. In the lucid darkness he knew that with a
terrible certitude. He had a horrible vision of things disastrously
muffled; of Lady Frensham and her _Morning Post_ friends first
garrulously and maliciously "patriotic," screaming her way with
incalculable mischiefs through the storm, and finally discovering that
the Germans were the real aristocrats and organising our national
capitulation on that understanding. He knew from talk he had heard that
the navy was weak in mines and torpedoes, unprovided with the great
monitors needed for a war with Germany; torn by doctrinaire feuds;
nevertheless the sea power was our only defence. In the whole country we
might muster a military miscellany of perhaps three hundred thousand
men. And he had no faith in their equipment, in their direction. General
French, the one man who had his entire confidence, had been forced to
resign through some lawyer's misunderstanding about the Irish
difficulty. He did not believe any plans existed for such a war as
Germany might force upon us, any calculation, any foresight of the thing
at all.

Why had we no foresight? Why had we this wilful blindness to
disagreeable possibilities? Why did we lie so open to the unexpected
crisis? Just what he said of himself he said also of his country. It was
curious to remember that. To realise how closely Dower House could play
the microcosm to the whole Empire....

It became relevant to the trend of his thoughts that his son had through
his mother a strong strain of the dark Irish in his comp