every night.  Similarly our England may have a right to congratulate itself upon the fact that her politics are very quiet, amicable, and humdrum.  But she must not congratulate herself upon that fact and also congratulate herself upon the self-restraint she shows in not tearing herself and her citizens into rags.  Between two English Privy Councillors polite language is a mark of civilisation, but really not a mark of magnanimity.

Allied to this question is the kindred question on which we so often hear an innocent British boast—­the fact that our statesmen are privately on very friendly relations, although in Parliament they sit on opposite sides of the House.  Here, again, it is as well to have no illusions.  Our statesmen are not monsters of mystical generosity or insane logic, who are really able to hate a man from three to twelve and to love him from twelve to three.  If our social relations are more peaceful than those of France or America or the England of a hundred years ago, it is simply because our politics are more peaceful; not improbably because our politics are more fictitious.  If our statesmen agree more in private, it is for the very simple reason that they agree more in public.  And the reason they agree so much in both cases is really that they belong to one social class; and therefore the dining life is the real life.  Tory and Liberal statesmen like each other, but it is not because they are both expansive; it is because they are both exclusive.

* * * * *

PATRIOTISM AND SPORT.

I notice that some papers, especially papers that call themselves patriotic, have fallen into quite a panic over the fact that we have been twice beaten in the world of sport, that a Frenchman has beaten us at golf, and that Belgians have beaten us at rowing.  I suppose that the incidents are important to any people who ever believed in the self-satisfied English legend on this subject.  I suppose that there are men who vaguely believe that we could never be beaten by a Frenchman, despite the fact that we have often been beaten by Frenchmen, and once by a Frenchwoman.  In the old pictures in Punch you will find a recurring piece of satire.  The English caricaturists always assumed that a Frenchman could not ride to hounds or enjoy English hunting.  It did not seem to occur to them that all the people who founded English hunting were Frenchmen.  All the Kings and nobles who originally rode to hounds spoke French.  Large numbers of those Englishmen who still ride to hounds have French names.  I suppose that the thing is important to any one who is ignorant of such evident matters as these.  I suppose that if a man has ever believed that we English have some sacred and separate right to be athletic, such reverses do appear quite enormous and shocking.  They feel as if, while the proper sun was rising in the east, some other and unexpected sun had begun to rise in the north-north-west