t by its blusterings into using the
irresistible powers of the State to intimidate the sensible people, thus
enabling a despicable minority of would-be lynchers to set up a reign of
terror which could at any time have been broken by a single stern word
from a responsible minister. But our ministers had not that sort of
courage: neither Heartbreak House nor Horseback Hall had bred it, much
less the suburbs. When matters at last came to the looting of shops by
criminals under patriotic pretexts, it was the police force and not the
Government that put its foot down. There was even one deplorable
moment, during the submarine scare, in which the Government yielded to a
childish cry for the maltreatment of naval prisoners of war, and, to our
great disgrace, was forced by the enemy to behave itself. And yet behind
all this public blundering and misconduct and futile mischief, the
effective England was carrying on with the most formidable capacity and
activity. The ostensible England was making the empire sick with its
incontinences, its ignorances, its ferocities, its panics, and its
endless and intolerable blarings of Allied national anthems in season
and out. The esoteric England was proceeding irresistibly to the
conquest of Europe.

The Practical Business Men

From the beginning the useless people set up a shriek for "practical
business men." By this they meant men who had become rich by placing
their personal interests before those of the country, and measuring the
success of every activity by the pecuniary profit it brought to them
and to those on whom they depended for their supplies of capital. The
pitiable failure of some conspicuous samples from the first batch we
tried of these poor devils helped to give the whole public side of the
war an air of monstrous and hopeless farce. They proved not only that
they were useless for public work, but that in a well-ordered nation
they would never have been allowed to control private enterprise.

How the Fools shouted the Wise Men down

Thus, like a fertile country flooded with mud, England showed no sign of
her greatness in the days when she was putting forth all her strength to
save herself from the worst consequences of her littleness. Most of
the men of action, occupied to the last hour of their time with urgent
practical work, had to leave to idler people, or to professional
rhetoricians, the presentation of the war to the reason and imagination
of the country