he future of the British Empire and, indeed, I could
almost say, of the whole world in his hands at the present time, as much
as any single sort of man can be said to hold it. Inside his skull
imagination and a heavy devil of evil precedent fight for his soul and
the welfare of the world. And generosity fights against tradition and
individualism. Only the men of the Press have anything like the same
great possibilities of betrayal.

To these two sorts of men the dim spirit of the nation looks for such
leading as a democracy can follow. To them the men with every sort of
special ability, the men of science, the men of this or that sort of
administrative ability and experience, the men of creative gifts and
habits, every sort of man who wants the world to get on, look for the
removal (or the ingenious contrivance) of obstructions and
entanglements, for the allaying (or the fomentation) of suspicion,
misapprehension, and ignorant opposition, for administration (or class
blackmail).

Yet while I sit as a prophetic amateur weighing these impalpable forces
of will and imagination and habit and interest in lawyer, pressman,
maker and administrator, and feeling by no means over-confident of the
issue, it dawns upon me suddenly that there is another figure present,
who has never been present before in the reckoning up of British
affairs. It is a silent figure. This figure stands among the pressmen
and among the lawyers and among the workers; for a couple of decades at
least he will be everywhere in the British system; he is young and he is
uniformed in khaki, and he brings with him a new spirit into British
life, the spirit of the new soldier, the spirit of subordination to a
common purpose....

France, which has lived so much farther and deeper and more bitterly
than Britain, knows....[2]

[Footnote 2: In "An Englishman Looks at the World," a companion volume
to the present one, which was first published by Messrs. Cassell early
in 1914, and is now obtainable in a shilling edition, the reader will
find a full discussion of the probable benefit of proportional
representation in eliminating the party hack from political life.
Proportional representation would probably break up party organisations
altogether, and it would considerably enhance the importance and
responsibility of the Press. It would do much to accelerate the
development of the state of affairs here foreshadowed, in which the role
of government and opposition u