I believe, the Saxon element) has too often
been prone to make a stronghold of ignorance. This stronghold has
certainly in industry proved to be a house of cards, and I think it has
proved to be equally a house of cards in religion. It would, indeed, be
a disastrous outcome of the war if it led us still more to emphasise our
insularity. Unless we are readier after the war to learn from everyone,
we shall, as a nation, be mentally moribund. It matters not in the least
whether the thought be German, French, Austrian, Swiss, Russian, or any
other. Miss Petre, in her "Reflections of a Non-Combatant," has finely
stated the wider view:

Thought and learning, art and music, may bear certain
characteristics of the country in which they are begotten; but
they are also the products of humanity itself, or they would
make no appeal to the world at large. The monuments of the
German mind are no more robbed of their intellectual value by
the national crime of this war than German mountains are robbed
of their natural grandeur, German forests of their solemnity, or
German rivers of their width and volume.

Any other attitude is extremely likely to degenerate into a petty
jealousy that is bred of fear. This is how Mr. H. G. Wells wrote of our
attitude towards Germany years ago:

We in Great Britain are now intensely jealous of Germany. We are
intensely jealous of Germany, not only because the Germans
outnumber us, and have a much larger and more diversified
country than ours, and lie in the very heart and body of Europe,
but because in the last hundred years, while we have fed on
platitudes and vanity, they have had the energy and humility to
develop a splendid system of national education, to toil at
science and art and literature, to develop social organisation,
to master and better our methods of business and industry, and
to clamber above us in the scale of civilisation. This has
humiliated and irritated rather than chastened us.

Such jealousy is a strangely short-sighted mistake. No valuable or
lasting peace will come till jealousy is exorcised. There are ominous
signs of the possible triumph of a deadly Saxon insularity, but there
are other signs that give us hope. When so ardent a combatant as Mr.
Lloyd George can speak well of the services of Germany to the world, all
is not lost. It is pleasant to be able to quote these passages from an
interview