,
which led otherwise honourable men to oppose with all their strength the
measures of their party opponents, even in the face of their country's
dire need.

Then there was the anti-British faction, a party which spread
fast-growing shoots from out the then Government's very heart and root.
The Government's half-hearted supporters were not anti-British, but they
were not readers of the _Daily Gazette_; they were not, in short,
whole-hearted Government supporters. They were Whigs, as the saying
went. My party, the readers of the _Gazette_, the out-and-out
Government party, to whom I looked for real progress, real social
reform; they were unquestionably riddled through and through with this
extraordinary sentiment which I call anti-British, a difficult thing to
explain nowadays.

With the newly and too easily acquired rights and liberties of the
nineteenth century, with its universal spread of education, cheap
literature, and the like, there came, of course, increased knowledge, a
wider outlook. No discipline came with it, and one of its earliest
products was a nervous dread of being thought behind the time, of being
called ignorant, narrow-minded, insular. People would do anything to
avoid this. They went to the length of interlarding their speech and
writings with foreign words often in ignorance of the meaning of those
words. Broad-minded, catholic, tolerant, cosmopolitan--those were the
descriptive adjectives which all desired to earn for themselves. It
became a perfect mania, particularly with the young and clever, the
half-educated, the would-be "smart" folk.

But it was also the honest ambition of many very worthy people, who
truly desired broad-minded understanding and the avoidance of prejudice.
This sapped the bulldog qualities of British pluck and persistence
terribly. You can see at a glance how it would shut out a budding Nelson
or a Wellington. But its most notable effect was to be seen among
politicians, who were able to claim Fox for a precedent.

To believe in the superiority of the British became vulgar, a proof of
narrow-mindedness. But, by that token, to enlarge upon the inferiority
of the British indicated a broad, tolerant spirit, and a wide outlook
upon mankind and affairs. From that to the sentiment I have called
anti-British was no more than a step. Many thoroughly good, honourable,
benevolent people took that step unwittingly, and all unconsciously
became permeated with the vicious, suicidal