"And now we are in another stage of being British. No longer are we symbolized by somnolent picture of sweetness on a treacle tin but by a living animal, with head held high, fangs bared and tail swishing, ready and willing for the fray, not for an; reasons of selfish conquest but as defender of the articles of the code in which we believe, faithfulness to our friends, decency in thought and action, freedom and security for all, great or small, and assured of the eventual establishment of the com mon right over bestial might, how ever long and fierce the struggle.
"Perhaps in this stage our friends will begin to understand us a little better. We shall fight in our own way and we shall "play cricket" as long as we can, abandoning no rule until such rule no longer exists by reason of its complete expunging by opponents who scrap without compunction all the rules of God or man. And this is when it becomes a little harder task to keep on being "Brifish." Our natural instinct always to play clean and stick to the rules makes it all the more difficult to break them, even when the other side deliberately and shamelessly plays foul. We somehow cannot bring ourselves to believe that machine-gunning refugee women and children, sinking a shipload of souls in the open ocean without warning and without means of survival, bombing and burning a country village, shooting down mercilessly those engaged only in acts of mercy and the relief of suffering, can possibly help us to gain the final object. We refuse to hit below the belt although forced to take foul blows ourselves. But there is a point when we are brought to the realization that all the rules have gone by the board, that one cannot play cricket' with mad dogs and that their destruction must be sought and encompassed by measures which we shall heartily detest in the using and which will be discarded immediately the job is done. But we shall still be British enough to use such measures only against the dirty players on the other side and not against the crowd on the side; lines, as long as they stay outside j the ropes. And when it is all over we shall be able to have a wash and brash-up, as we do after any other unpleasant but necessary job of work, end know that-our hands are as clean as before, and that the temporary soiling of them has been with the filth of the adversary and not our own.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.