countries because they were different from our own. The
adventurer did indeed, like the third son, set out to seek his fortune,
but not primarily to alter other people's fortunes; he wished to trade
with people rather than to rule them. But as the other people remained
different from him, so did he remain different from them. The adventurer
saw a thousand strange things and remained a stranger. He was the
Robinson Crusoe on a hundred desert islands; and on each he remained as
insular as on his own island.

What is wanted for the cause of England to-day is an Englishman with
enough imagination to love his country from the outside as well as the
inside. That is, we need somebody who will do for the English what has
never been done for them, but what is done for any outlandish peasantry
or even any savage tribe. We want people who can make England
attractive; quite apart from disputes about whether England is strong or
weak. We want somebody to explain, not that England is everywhere, but
what England is anywhere; not that England is or is not really dying,
but why we do not want her to die. For this purpose the official and
conventional compliments or claims can never get any farther than
pompous abstractions about Law and Justice and Truth; the ideals which
England accepts as every civilised state accepts them, and violates as
every civilised state violates them. That is not the way in which the
picture of any people has ever been painted on the sympathetic
imagination of the world. Enthusiasts for old Japan did not tell us that
the Japs recognised the existence of abstract morality; but that they
lived in paper houses or wrote letters with paint-brushes. Men who
wished to interest us in Arabs did not confine themselves to saying that
they are monotheists or moralists; they filled our romances with the
rush of Arab steeds or the colours of strange tents or carpets. What we
want is somebody who will do for the Englishman with his front garden
what was done for the Jap and his paper house; who shall understand the
Englishman with his dog as well as the Arab with his horse. In a word,
what nobody has really tried to do is the one thing that really wants
doing. It is to make England attractive as a nationality, and even as a
small nationality.

For it is a wild folly to suppose that nations will love each other
because they are alike. They will never really do that unless they are
really alike; and then they will not be nat