warned. They had seen, in one generation, the rise of the military and
naval power of the Japanese, a brown-skinned race living in some island
rice fields in a tropical sea, a people one thought of in connection with
paper fans and flowers and pretty tea-gardens, who suddenly marched and
sailed into the world's gaze as a Great Power; they had seen, too, the
rise of the Bulgars, a poor herd of zaptieh-ridden peasants, with a few
students scattered in exile in Bukarest and Odessa, who shot up in one
generation to be an armed and aggressive nation with history in its
hands. The English saw these things happening around them, and with a
war-cloud growing blacker and bigger and always more threatening on their
own threshold they sat down to grow soft and peaceful. They grew soft
and accommodating in all things in religion--"

"In religion?" said Yeovil.

"In religion, yes," said his companion emphatically; "they had come to
look on the Christ as a sort of amiable elder Brother, whose letters from
abroad were worth reading. Then, when they had emptied all the divine
mystery and wonder out of their faith naturally they grew tired of it,
oh, but dreadfully tired of it. I know many English of the country
parts, and always they tell me they go to church once in each week to set
the good example to the servants. They were tired of their faith, but
they were not virile enough to become real Pagans; their dancing fauns
were good young men who tripped Morris dances and ate health foods and
believed in a sort of Socialism which made for the greatest dulness of
the greatest number. You will find plenty of them still if you go into
what remains of social London."

Yeovil gave a grunt of acquiescence.

"They grew soft in their political ideas," continued the unsparing
critic; "for the old insular belief that all foreigners were devils and
rogues they substituted another belief, equally grounded on insular lack
of knowledge, that most foreigners were amiable, good fellows, who only
needed to be talked to and patted on the back to become your friends and
benefactors. They began to believe that a foreign Minister would
relinquish long-cherished schemes of national policy and hostile
expansion if he came over on a holiday and was asked down to country
houses and shown the tennis court and the rock-garden and the younger
children. Listen. I once heard it solemnly stated at an after-dinner
debate in some literary club that a certa