er was for the time declined.

The declining of the American offer has been called the expression of a
nation's pride. It was that, incidentally. First and foremost--and this,
I think, is the point which should never be forgotten--it was the
expression of a nation's true humility. Pride we had always with us in
England, of the right sort and the wrong sort; of the sort that adds to
a people's stature, and sometimes, of late, of the gross and senseless
sort that leads a people into decadence. But in the past year we had
learned to know and cherish that true pride which has its foundations in
the rock of Duty, and is buttressed all about and crowned by that
quality which St. Peter said earned the grace of God--humility.

For my part, I see in that Message the ripe fruit of the Canadian
preachers' teaching; the crux and essence of the simple faith which came
to be called "British Christianity." I think the spirit of it was the
spirit of the general revival in England that came to us with the
Canadian preachers; even as so much other help, spiritual and material,
came to us from our kinsmen of the greater Britain overseas, which,
before that time, we had never truly recognized as actually part, and by
far the greater part, of our State.

XVII

THE PENALTY

We cannot all be masters, nor all masters
Cannot be truly followed.

_Othello._

It would be distinctly a work of supererogation for me to attempt to
tell the story of the Anglo-German war--of all modern wars the most
remarkable in some ways, and certainly the war which has been most
exhaustively treated by modern historians. A. Low says in the concluding
chapter of his fine history:

"Putting aside the fighting in South Africa, and after the initial
destruction of both the German Navy and its Army in England (as
effective forces), we must revert to the wars of more than a century ago
to find parallels for this remarkable conflict. There can be no doubt
that at the time of the invasion of England Germany's effective fighting
strength was enormous. Its growth had been very rapid; its decline must
be dated from General von Fuechter's occupation of London on Black
Saturday.

"At that moment everything appeared to bode well for the realization of
the Emperor's ambition to be Dictator of Europe, as the ruler of by far
the greatest Power in the Old World. From that moment the German people,
but more parti