I might go on interminably with this dissertation, but I have said enough for my purpose.  The history of England has had much to do with moulding the English temper.  We have been protected from direct exposure to the storms that have swept the Continent.  Our wars on land have been adventures undertaken by expeditionary forces.  At sea, while the power of England was growing, we have been explorers, pirates, buccaneers.  Now that we are involved in a great European war on land, our methods have been changed.  The artillery and infantry of a modern army cannot act effectively on their own impulse.  We hold the sea, and the pirates’ work for the present has passed into other hands.  But our spirit and temper is the same as of old.  It has found a new world in the air.  War in the air, under the conditions of to-day, demands all the old gallantry and initiative.  The airman depends on his own brain and nerve; he cannot fall back on orders from his superiors.  Our airmen of to-day are the true inheritors of Drake; they have the same inspired recklessness, the same coolness, and the same chivalry to a vanquished enemy.

I am a very bad example of the English temper; for the English temper grumbles at all this, to the great relief of our enemies, who believe that what a man admits against his own nation must be true.  Our pessimists, by indulging their natural vein, serve us, without reward, quite as well as Germany is served by her wireless press.  They deceive the enemy.

Modern Germany has organized and regimented her people like an ant-hill or a beehive.  The people themselves, including many who belong to the upper class, are often simple villagers in temper, full of kindness and anger, much subject to envy and jealousy, not magnanimous, docile and obedient to a fault.  If they claimed, as individuals, to represent the highest reach of European civilization, the claim would be merely absurd.  So they shift their ground, and pretend that society is greater than man, and that by their painstaking organization their society has been raised to the pinnacle of human greatness.  They make this claim so insistently, and in such obvious good faith, that some few weak tempers and foolish minds in England have been impressed by it.  These panic-stricken counsellors advise us, without delay, to reform our institutions and organize them upon the German model.  Only thus, they tell us, can we hold our own against so huge a power.  But if we were to take their advice, we should have nothing of our own left to hold.  It is reasonable and good to co-operate and organize in order to attain an agreed object, but German organization goes far beyond this.  The German nation is a carefully built, smooth-running machine, with powerful engines.  It has only one fault—­that any fool can drive it; and seeing that the governing class in Germany is obstinate and unimaginative, there is no lack of drivers to pilot it to disaster.  The best ability of Germany is seen in her military organization.  Napoleon is her worshipped model, and, like many admirers of Napoleon, she thinks only of his great campaigns; she forgets that he died in St. Helena, and that his schemes for the reorganization of Europe failed.