pain and Italy
shadows, Denmark and Sweden farces, Turkey a sinful anachronism."

"And Britain?" George asked.

"My Scotch blood gives me the right to speak my mind," said the man,
laughing. "Honestly I don't find things much better in Britain. You
were always famous for a dogged common sense which was never tricked
with catch-words, and yet the British people seem to be growing nervous
and ingenuous. The cult of abstract ideals, which has been the curse of
the world since Adam, is as strong with you as elsewhere. The
philosophy of 'gush' is good enough in its place, but it is the devil in
politics."

"That is true enough," said Lewis solemnly. "And then you are losing
grip. A belief in sentiment means a disbelief in competence and
strength, and that is the last and fatalest heresy. And a belief in
sentiment means a foolish scepticism towards the great things of life.
There is none of the blood and bone left for honest belief. You hold
your religion half-heartedly. Honest fanaticism is a thing intolerable
to you. You are all mild, rational sentimentalists, and I would not
give a ton of it for an ounce of good prejudice." George and Lewis
laughed.

"And Russia?" they asked.

"Ah, there I have hope. You have a great people, uneducated and
unspoiled. They are physically strong, and they have been trained by
centuries of serfdom to discipline and hardships. Also, there is fire
smouldering somewhere. You must remember that Russia is the
stepdaughter of the East. The people are northern in the truest sense,
but they have a little of Eastern superstition. A rational, sentimental
people live in towns or market gardens, like your English country, but
great lonely plains and forests somehow do not agree with that sort of
creed. That slow people can still believe freshly and simply, and some
day when the leader arrives they will push beyond their boundaries and
sweep down on Western Europe, as their ancestors did thirteen hundred
years ago. And you have no walls of Rome to resist them, and I do not
think you will find a Charlemagne. Good heavens! What can your
latter-day philosophic person, who weighs every action and believes only
in himself, do against an unwearied people with the fear of God in their
hearts? When that day comes, my masters, we shall have a new empire,
the Holy Eastern Empire, and this rotten surface civilization of ours
will be swept off. It is always the way. Men get into the habit of
believing that the