portant point) no love of wildness for
its own sake, like Nietzsche or the anarchic poets, but only a
readiness to employ it to get rid of unreason or disorder. With these
epochs it is not altogether impossible to say that some such form of
words is a key. The epoch for which it is almost impossible to find a
form of words is our own.

Nevertheless, I think that with us the keyword is "inevitability," or,
as I should be inclined to call it, "impenitence." We are
subconsciously dominated in all departments by the notion that there
is no turning back, and it is rooted in materialism and the denial of
free-will. Take any handful of modern facts and compare them with the
corresponding facts a few hundred years ago. Compare the modern Party
System with the political factions of the seventeenth century. The
difference is that in the older time the party leaders not only really
cut off each other's heads, but (what is much more alarming) really
repealed each other's laws. With us it has become traditional for one
party to inherit and leave untouched the acts of the other when made,
however bitterly they were attacked in the making. James II. and his
nephew William were neither of them very gay specimens; but they would
both have laughed at the idea of "a continuous foreign policy." The
Tories were not Conservatives; they were, in the literal sense,
reactionaries. They did not merely want to keep the Stuarts; they
wanted to bring them back.

Or again, consider how obstinately the English mediaeval monarchy
returned again and again to its vision of French possessions, trying
to reverse the decision of fate; how Edward III. returned to the
charge after the defeats of John and Henry III., and Henry V. after
the failure of Edward III.; and how even Mary had that written on her
heart which was neither her husband nor her religion. And then
consider this: that we have comparatively lately known a universal
orgy of the thing called Imperialism, the unity of the Empire the only
topic, colonies counted like crown jewels, and the Union Jack waved
across the world. And yet no one so much as dreamed, I will not say of
recovering, the American colonies for the Imperial unity (which would
have been too dangerous a task for modern empire-builders), but even
of re-telling the story from an Imperial standpoint. Henry V.
justified the claims of Edward III. Joseph Chamberlain would not have
dreamed of justifying the claims of George III. Nay, S