e of
even its defences, for the sake of adding to their own immediate ease.
And you have ridiculed, as a survival of barbarous times, the efforts of
such men as the brave old Field Marshal who gave his declining years to
the thankless task of urging England to make some effort of preparation
to fend off just that very crisis which has now come upon her, and
found her absolutely unprepared. That is how you have earned your right
to live, a citizen of the freest country in the world, a subject of the
greatest Empire the world has ever seen. And when you have had leisure
and money to spend, you have devoted it to overeating and drinking, and
helping to fill the tills of alien parasites in Soho. That has been your
part. And now, now that the fatal crisis has arrived, you, whose
qualification is that you can wield the pen of a begging letter-writer,
who is also scurrilous and insolent--you lie in bed and clench your
useless hands, and prate of work for Englishmen!"

That was the thought that came to me with a sudden chill that night; and
I suppose I was one of the earliest among millions doomed to writhe
under the impotent shame of such a thought. I shall never forget that
night in my Bloomsbury lodging. It was my ordeal of self-revelation. I
suppose I slept a little toward morning; but I rose early with a kind of
vague longing to escape from the company of the personality my thought
had shown me in the night.

It is natural that the awakening of an individual should be a more
speedy process than the awakening of a people--a nation. I regard my
early rising on that Monday morning as the beginning of my first real
awakening to life as an Englishman. I had still far to go--I had not
even crossed the threshold as yet.

XVII

ONE STEP FORWARD

Thy trust, thy honours, these were great; the greater now thy shame,
for thou hast proved both unready and unfit, unworthy offspring of a
noble sire!--MERROW'S _Country Tales_.

Five minutes after Clement Blaine reached the office of _The Mass_ that
morning, he had lost the services of his assistant editor, and I felt
that I had taken one step upward from a veritable quagmire of
humiliation.

Blaine was almost too excited about the news of the day to pay much heed
to my little speech of resignation. The morning paper to which he
subscribed--a Radical journal of pronounced tone--had observed far less
reticence than most of its contemporaries, and, in its desire