aw the
pitiful wretches, men, women and sometimes children, clad in filthy
rags, starved white and frozen blue, soaked in winter rains and
shivering in winter winds, homeless, hopeless, unheeded by the doctors
of divinity, unpreserved by Gibson's "Preservative". I walked on
Hampstead Heath on Easter day, when the population of the slums turns
out for its one holiday; I walked, literally trembling with horror,
for I had never seen such sights nor dreamed of them. These creatures
were hardly to be recognized as human beings; they were some new
grotesque race of apes. They could not walk, they could only shamble;
they could not laugh, they could only leer. I saw a hand-organ
playing, and turned away--the things they did in their efforts to
dance were not to be watched. And then I went out into the beautiful
English country; cultured and charming ladies took me in swift, smooth
motor-cars, and I saw the pitiful hovels and the drink-sodden,
starch-poisoned inhabitants--slum-populations everywhere, even on the
land! When the newspaper reporters came to me, I said that I had just
come from Germany, and that if ever England found herself at war with
that country, she would regret that she had let the bodies and the
minds of her people rot; for which expression I was severely taken to
task by more than one British divine.

The bodies--and the minds; the rot of the latter being the cause of
the former. All over England in that year of 1910, in thousands of
schools, rich and poor, and in the greatest centres of learning, men
like Dean Goode were teaching boys dead languages and dead sciences
and dead arts; sending them out to life with no more conception of the
modern world than a monk of the Middle Ages; sending them out with
minds made hard and inflexible, ignorant of science, indifferent to
progress, contemptuous of ideas. And then suddenly, almost overnight,
this terrified people finds itself at war with a nation ruled and
disciplined' by modern experts, scientists and technicians. The awful
muddle that was in England during the first two years of the war has
not yet been told in print; but thousands know it, and some day it
will be written, and it will finish forever the prestige of the
British ruling caste. They rushed off an expedition to Gallipoli, and
somebody forgot the water-supply, and at one time they had ninety-five
thousand cases of dysentery!

They always "muddle through", they tell you; that is the motto of
the