sly to affect the balance of the war.

And these spurs and their retention are only the outward and visible
symbol of the obstinate resistance of the Anglican intelligence to
the clear logic of the present situation. It is not only the external
equipment of our leaders that falls behind the times; our political
and administrative services are in the hands of the same desolatingly
inadaptable class. The British are still wearing spurs in Ireland; they
are wearing them in India; and the age of the spur has passed. At the
outset of this war there was an absolute cessation of criticism of the
military and administrative castes; it is becoming a question whether
we may not pay too heavily in blundering and waste, in military and
economic lassitude, in international irritation and the accumulation of
future dangers in Ireland, Egypt, India, and elsewhere, for an apparent
absence of internal friction. These people have no gratitude for tacit
help, no spirit of intelligent service, and no sense of fair play to the
outsider. The latter deficiency indeed they call _esprit de corps_ and
prize it as if it were a noble quality.

It becomes more and more imperative that the foreign observer should
distinguish between this narrower, older official Britain and
the greater newer Britain that struggles to free itself from the
entanglement of a system outgrown. There are many Englishmen who would
like to say to the French and Irish and the Italians and India, who
indeed feel every week now a more urgent need of saying, "Have patience
with us." The Riddle of the British is very largely solved if you will
think of a great modern liberal nation seeking to slough an exceedingly
tough and tight skin....

Nothing is more illuminating and self-educational than to explain one's
home politics to an intelligent foreigner enquirer; it strips off all
the secondary considerations, the allusiveness, the merely tactical
considerations, the allusiveness, the merely tactical considerations.
One sees the forest not as a confusion of trees but as something with
a definite shape and place. I was asked in Italy and in France, "Where
does Lord Northcliffe come into the British system--or Lloyd George?
Who is Mr. Redmond? Why is Lloyd George a Minister, and why does not
Mr. Redmond take office? Isn't there something called an ordnance
department, and why is there a separate ministry of munitions? Can Mr.
Lloyd George remove an incapable general?..."

I foun