Britain is no longer an island, and the British people are painfully adapting themselves to a new psychology, to the psychology of a people which realizes that, if there is war, it will not be fought abroad but in large part will take possibly the form of making a hell of England's green and pleasant land.
The late war was itself. in its conduct, a painful novelty, It was necessary (or thought necessary) to raise great armies like those of France and Germany; the whole population was directly or indirectly enrolled in war work. English social institutions like the Derby, fox hunting, professional football were seriously interfered with, Like her Continental Allies, England was in a state of siege; less intense than that of France or Germany, but rigorous to a degree unknown in previous British history. It has often been pointed out since 1914 that Jane Austen (who belonged to a naval family) has hardly an indication in her novels that her young men' are courting and sulking while the Cor-sloan Ogre is menacing the liberties of Europe. Except for the mild comic relief of the amours of the militia officers or slight references to the navy, the great war (as it contemporaries called it) left only the most superficial traces on the work of so acute a social observer that pacifism in some form or other should be a political force that any government has to face, a political force hardly less formidable than the isolationism of the Middle' West in the United States.
Some of that pacifism, like Aldous Huxley's, is complete; given his premises, complete pacifism is logical and desirable, But, though the unconditional peace pledge being widely signed, it is not and will not be of great political importance.
Certain writers and politician believe that Britain may be betrayed by any Continental allies that she may have, that she has nothing to lose or gain in Europe, and that, refusing to touch the accursed thing. she can remain clean and safe. This spirit lay behind the general indifference the German breach of Locarno the occupation of the by Rhineland. Arguments based on the of honouring the national {ure meant nothing to this class of persons and that any such question should have been raised added to the irritation left against the French.
Anti-French feeling is undoubtedly strong in this group, but' its base is less dislike of the French for doing what they do than for being where they are. If they were not so ne: if there were not awkward traditions engagements to defend French: possible, so it to out of Continental wars altogether. And if the French ould only behave themselves (that But there is more; there are mem-think first of British interests inones of nights and even of day: when the guns were firing not in Flanders but in London; when women and children shivered' or stifled in the subways or cellars waiting for the "all clear." and when the great city knew (for the first time since the Dutch sailed up the Thames in 1667) what it was to haven enemy at the gates. Four times in a century Parisians had known what that meant; but the capital of the empire on which the sun never sets no more expected such an ordeal than did the Romans of Trojan or Hadrian's time foresee the barbarian menace that stead of their own selfish designs), the regrettable fact that the Channel is only 20 miles across and not getting idea could be tolerated. But the French, with their alliances and doctrines of "an indivisible peace," are involving themselves in a net from which war is the only issue. Why should not Britain invoke a plague on both your houses and leave France and Germany and Russia and Italy to their doom?
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.