until the innocent young have paid
for the guilty old, and the account is balanced. And then she goes to
sleep again and gives another period of credit, with the same result.

This is what has just happened in our political hygiene. Political
science has been as recklessly neglected by Governments and electorates
during my lifetime as sanitary science was in the days of Charles the
Second. In international relations diplomacy has been a boyishly lawless
affair of family intrigues, commercial and territorial brigandage,
torpors of pseudo-goodnature produced by laziness and spasms of
ferocious activity produced by terror. But in these islands we muddled
through. Nature gave us a longer credit than she gave to France or
Germany or Russia. To British centenarians who died in their beds in
1914, any dread of having to hide underground in London from the
shells of an enemy seemed more remote and fantastic than a dread of the
appearance of a colony of cobras and rattlesnakes in Kensington Gardens.
In the prophetic works of Charles Dickens we were warned against
many evils which have since come to pass; but of the evil of being
slaughtered by a foreign foe on our own doorsteps there was no shadow.
Nature gave us a very long credit; and we abused it to the utmost. But
when she struck at last she struck with a vengeance. For four years
she smote our firstborn and heaped on us plagues of which Egypt never
dreamed. They were all as preventable as the great Plague of London, and
came solely because they had not been prevented. They were not undone by
winning the war. The earth is still bursting with the dead bodies of the
victors.

The Wicked Half Century

It is difficult to say whether indifference and neglect are worse than
false doctrine; but Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall unfortunately
suffered from both. For half a century before the war civilization had
been going to the devil very precipitately under the influence of a
pseudo-science as disastrous as the blackest Calvinism. Calvinism taught
that as we are predestinately saved or damned, nothing that we can do
can alter our destiny. Still, as Calvinism gave the individual no clue
as to whether he had drawn a lucky number or an unlucky one, it left
him a fairly strong interest in encouraging his hopes of salvation and
allaying his fear of damnation by behaving as one of the elect might
be expected to behave rather than as one of the reprobate. But in the
middle of