e form of understatement. 'Give
Dayrolles a chair' were the last dying words of Lord Chesterfield,
spoken of the friend who had come to see him. When the French troops go
over the parapet to make an advance, their battle cry shouts the praises
of their Country. The British troops prefer to celebrate the advance in
a more trivial fashion, 'This way to the early door, sixpence extra.'

I might go on interminably with this dissertation, but I have said
enough for my purpose. The history of England has had much to do with
moulding the English temper. We have been protected from direct
exposure to the storms that have swept the Continent. Our wars on land
have been adventures undertaken by expeditionary forces. At sea, while
the power of England was growing, we have been explorers, pirates,
buccaneers. Now that we are involved in a great European war on land,
our methods have been changed. The artillery and infantry of a modern
army cannot act effectively on their own impulse. We hold the sea, and
the pirates' work for the present has passed into other hands. But our
spirit and temper is the same as of old. It has found a new world in the
air. War in the air, under the conditions of to-day, demands all the old
gallantry and initiative. The airman depends on his own brain and nerve;
he cannot fall back on orders from his superiors. Our airmen of to-day
are the true inheritors of Drake; they have the same inspired
recklessness, the same coolness, and the same chivalry to a vanquished
enemy.

I am a very bad example of the English temper; for the English temper
grumbles at all this, to the great relief of our enemies, who believe
that what a man admits against his own nation must be true. Our
pessimists, by indulging their natural vein, serve us, without reward,
quite as well as Germany is served by her wireless press. They deceive
the enemy.

Modern Germany has organized and regimented her people like an ant-hill
or a beehive. The people themselves, including many who belong to the
upper class, are often simple villagers in temper, full of kindness and
anger, much subject to envy and jealousy, not magnanimous, docile and
obedient to a fault. If they claimed, as individuals, to represent the
highest reach of European civilization, the claim would be merely
absurd. So they shift their ground, and pretend that society is greater
than man, and that by their painstaking organization their society has
been raised to the pinnacle