the ports of the North Sea. It is quite equally
arguable that if she had been as heartily on the side of the French
Revolution as she was at last against it, she could have claimed the
same concessions from the other side. It is certain that England had no
necessary communion with the arms and tortures of the Continental
tyrannies, and that she stood at the parting of the ways. England was
indeed an aristocracy, but a liberal one; and the ideas growing in the
middle classes were those which had already made America, and were
remaking France. The fiercest Jacobins, such as Danton, were deep in the
liberal literature of England. The people had no religion to fight for,
as in Russia or La Vendee. The parson was no longer a priest, and had
long been a small squire. Already that one great blank in our land had
made snobbishness the only religion of South England; and turned rich
men into a mythology. The effect can be well summed up in that decorous
abbreviation by which our rustics speak of "Lady's Bedstraw," where they
once spoke of "Our Lady's Bedstraw." We have dropped the comparatively
democratic adjective, and kept the aristocratic noun. South England is
still, as it was called in the Middle Ages, a garden; but it is the kind
where grow the plants called "lords and ladies."

We became more and more insular even about our continental conquests; we
stood upon our island as if on an anchored ship. We never thought of
Nelson at Naples, but only eternally at Trafalgar; and even that Spanish
name we managed to pronounce wrong. But even if we regard the first
attack upon Napoleon as a national necessity, the general trend remains
true. It only changes the tale from a tragedy of choice to a tragedy of
chance. And the tragedy was that, for a second time, we were at one with
the Germans.

But if England had nothing to fight for but a compromise, Prussia had
nothing to fight for but a negation. She was and is, in the supreme
sense, the spirit that denies. It is as certain that she was fighting
against liberty in Napoleon as it is that she was fighting against
religion in Maria Theresa. What she was fighting for she would have
found it quite impossible to tell you. At the best, it was for Prussia;
if it was anything else, it was tyranny. She cringed to Napoleon when he
beat her, and only joined in the chase when braver people had beaten
him. She professed to restore the Bourbons, and tried to rob them while
she was restoring them