y princess to the
English crowd. The national poet had hailed her as a daughter of the
sea-kings; and she was, and indeed still is, the most popular royal
figure in England. But whatever our people may have been like, our
politicians were on the very tamest level of timidity and the fear of
force to which they have ever sunk. The Tin Soldier of the Danish army
and the paper boat of the Danish navy, as in the story, were swept away
down the great gutter, down that colossal _cloaca_ that leads to the
vast cesspool of Berlin.

Why, as a fact, did not England interpose? There were a great many
reasons given, but I think they were all various inferences from one
reason; indirect results and sometimes quite illogical results, of what
we have called the Germanisation of England. First, the very insularity
on which we insisted was barbaric, in its refusal of a seat in the
central senate of the nations. What we called our splendid isolation
became a rather ignominious sleeping-partnership with Prussia. Next, we
were largely trained in irresponsibility by our contemporary historians,
Freeman and Green, teaching us to be proud of a possible descent from
King Arthur's nameless enemies and not from King Arthur. King Arthur
might not be historical, but at least he was legendary. Hengist and
Horsa were not even legendary, for they left no legend. Anybody could
see what was obligatory on the representative of Arthur; he was bound to
be chivalrous, that is, to be European. But nobody could imagine what
was obligatory on the representative of Horsa, unless it were to be
horsy. That was perhaps the only part of the Anglo-Saxon programme that
the contemporary English really carried out. Then, in the very real
decline from Cobbett to Cobden (that is, from a broad to a narrow
manliness and good sense) there had grown up the cult of a very curious
kind of peace, to be spread all over the world not by pilgrims, but by
pedlars. Mystics from the beginning had made vows of peace--but they
added to them vows of poverty. Vows of poverty were not in the
Cobdenite's line. Then, again, there was the positive praise of Prussia,
to which steadily worsening case the Carlyleans were already committed.
But beyond these, there was something else, a spirit which had more
infected us as a whole. That spirit was the spirit of Hamlet. We gave
the grand name of "evolution" to a notion that things do themselves. Our
wealth, our insularity, our gradual loss of fai