perceptibly traversed. If only we
could realize at present how rapidly and irrevocably we are drifting
away from our old-world moorings, we should feel in a more congenial
mood for adjusting ourselves to the new and unpopular requirements of
the era now dawning. Already we are becoming a militarist and a
protective State, but we do not yet know it. We have broken with the
traditions of our own peculiar and insular form of civilization, of
which poets like Tennyson were the high priests, yet we hesitate to
bid them farewell. We still base our forecasts of the future political
life on the past and calculate the outcome of the next elections, the
fate of Disestablishment and Home Rule, the relative positions of the
chief Parliamentary parties on the old bases, and draw up our plans
accordingly. In short, we still bear about with us the fragrant
atmosphere of our previous existence which will never be renewed. And
it is owing to the effects of that disturbing medium that our
observations have been so defective and our mistakes so sinister. We
still fail to perceive that decay has overtaken the organs of our
Party Government and the groundwork of our State fabric is rotten.
Yet everything about and around us is in flux. We are in the midst of
a new environment.

When this war is over we shall search in vain for what was peculiarly
British in our cherished civilization. Of that civilization which
reached its acme during the reign of the late King Edward, we have
seen the last, little though most of us realize its passing. It was an
age of sturdy good sense, healthy animalism, and dignity withal, and
not devoid of a strong flavour of humanity and home-reared virtue. But
in every branch of politics and some departments of science it was an
age of amateurism. Respect for right, for liberty, for law and
tradition, for relative truth and gradual progress, was widely
diffused. Well-controlled energy, responsiveness to calls on one's
fellow-feeling, and the everyday honesty that tapers into policy were
among its familiar features. But if one were asked to sum it all up in
a single word it would be hard to utter one more comprehensive or
characteristic than the essentially English term, comfort. Comfort was
the apex of the pyramid which is now crumbling away. And it is that
Laodicean civilization, and not the fierce spirit of the new time,
which is incarnate in the present official leaders of the British
nation.

The French, too,