this war for either Germany or Britain or Russia;
we three have chanced to be the biggest of the combatants, but the
glory lies with invincible France. It is France and Belgium and
Serbia who shine as the heroic lands. They have fought defensively
and beyond all expectation, for dear land and freedom. This war for
them has been a war of simple, definite issues, to which they have
risen with an entire nobility. Englishman and German alike may well
envy them that simplicity. I look to you, as an honest man schooled
by the fierce lessons of this war, to meet me in my passionate
desire to see France, Belgium and Serbia emerge restored from all
this blood and struggle, enlarged to the limits of their
nationality, vindicated and secure. Russia I will not write about
here; let me go on at once to tell you about my own country;
remarking only that between England and Russia there are endless
parallelisms. We have similar complexities, kindred difficulties. We
have for instance an imported dynasty, we have a soul-destroying
State Church which cramps and poisons the education of our ruling
class, we have a people out of touch with a secretive government,
and the same traditional contempt for science. We have our Irelands
and Polands. Even our kings bear a curious likeness...._

At this point there was a break in the writing, and Mr. Britling made,
as it were, a fresh beginning.

_Politically the British Empire is a clumsy collection of strange
accidents. It is a thing as little to be proud of as the outline of
a flint or the shape of a potato. For the mass of English people
India and Egypt and all that side of our system mean less than
nothing; our trade is something they do not understand, our imperial
wealth something they do not share. Britain has been a group of
four democracies caught in the net of a vast yet casual imperialism;
the common man here is in a state of political perplexity from the
cradle to the grave. None the less there is a great people here even
as there is a great people in Russia, a people with a soul and
character of its own, a people of unconquerable kindliness and with
a peculiar genius, which still struggle towards will and expression.
We have been beginning that same great experiment that France and
America and Switzerland and China are making, the experiment of
dem