e, which lie
upon the man of blood and iron, as compared with the man of blood and
bone. It is one grave disadvantage, for instance, that if a man made
of iron were to break his bones, they would not heal. In other words,
the Prussian Empire, with all its perfections and efficiencies, has
one notable defect--that it is a dead thing. It does not draw its life
from any primary human religion or poetry; it does not grow again from
within. And being a dead thing, it suffers also from having no nerves
to give warning or reaction; it reads no danger signals; it has no
premonitions; about its own spiritual doom its sentinels are deaf and
all its spies are blind. On the other hand, the British Empire, with
all its blunders and bad anomalies, to which I am the last person to
be blind, has one noticeable advantage--that it is a living thing. It
is not that it makes no mistakes, but it knows it has made them, as
the living hand knows when it has touched hot iron. That is exactly
what a hand of iron would not know; and that is exactly the error in
the German ideal of a hand of iron. No candid critic of England can
read its history fairly and fail to see a certain flexibility and
self-modification; illiberal policies followed by liberal ones; men
failing in something and succeeding in something else; men sent to do
one thing and being wise enough to do another; the human power of the
living hand to draw back. As it happens, Kitchener was extraordinarily
English in this lively and vital moderation. And it is to be feared
that the more German idealisation of him, in the largely unenlightened
England before the war, has already done some harm to his reputation,
and in missing what was particularly English has missed what was
particularly interesting.

Lord Kitchener was personally a somewhat silent man; and his social
conventions were those of the ordinary English officer, especially the
officer who has lived among Orientals--conventions which in any case
tend in the direction of silence. He also really had, and to an extent
of which some people complained, a certain English embarrassment about
making all his purposes clear, especially before they were clear to
himself. He probably liked to think a thing out in his own way and
therefore at his own time, which was not always the time at which
people thought they had a right to question him. In this way it is
true of him, as of such another strong man as the Irish patriot
Parnell, that