d it M. Joseph Reinach particularly penetrating and persistent.
It is an amusing but rather difficult exercise to recall what I tried
to convey to him by way of a theory of Britain. He is by no means an
uncritical listener. I explained that there is an "inner Britain,"
official Britain, which is Anglican or official Presbyterian, which at
the outside in the whole world cannot claim to speak for twenty million
Anglican or Presbyterian communicants, which monopolises official
positions, administration and honours in the entire British empire,
dominates the court, and, typically, is spurred and red-tabbed. (It was
just at this time that the spurs were most on my nerves.)

This inner Britain, I went on to explain, holds tenaciously to its
positions of advantage, from which it is difficult to dislodge it
without upsetting the whole empire, and it insists upon treating
the rest of the four hundred millions who constitute that empire as
outsiders, foreigners, subject races and suspected persons.

"To you," I said, "it bears itself with an appearance of faintly
hostile, faintly contemptuous apathy. It is still so entirely insular
that it shudders at the thought of the Channel Tunnel. This is the
Britain which irritates and puzzles you so intensely--that you are quite
unable to conceal these feelings from me. Unhappily it is the Britain
you see most of. Well, outside this official Britain is 'Greater
Britain'--the real Britain with which you have to reckon in the
future." (From this point a faint flavour of mysticism crept into
my dissertation. I found myself talking with something in my voice
curiously reminiscent of those liberal Russians who set themselves to
explain the contrasts and contradictions of "official" Russia and "true"
Russia.) "This Greater Britain," I asserted, "is in a perpetual conflict
with official Britain, struggling to keep it up to its work, shoving it
towards its ends, endeavouring in spite of its tenacious mischievousness
of the privileged to keep the peace and a common aim with the French and
Irish and Italians and Russians and Indians. It is to that outer Britain
that those Englishmen you found so interesting and sympathetic, Lloyd
George and Lord Northcliffe, for example, belong. It is the Britain of
the great effort, the Britain of the smoking factories and the torrent
of munitions, the Britain of the men and subalterns of the new armies,
the Britain which invents and thinks and achieves, and stands