milder and more tolerable shape of the party system.  The only people we have ever shown ourselves unwilling to tolerate are the people who will tolerate no one but their own kind.  We hate all Acts of Uniformity with a deadly hatred.  We are careful for the rights of minorities.  We think life should be made possible, and we do not object to its being made happy, for dissenters.  Voltaire, the acutest French mind of his age, remarked on this when he visited England in 1726.  ‘England’, he says, ’is the country of sects.  “In my father’s house are many mansions"....  Although the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians are the two dominant sects in Great Britain, all the others are welcomed there, and live together very fairly, whilst most of the preachers hate one another almost as cordially as a Jansenist damns a Jesuit.  Enter the London Exchange, a place much more worthy of respect than most Courts, and you see assembled for the benefit of mankind representatives of all nations.  There the Jew, the Mohammedan, and the Christian deal with each other as if they were of the same religion, and call infidels only those who become bankrupt.  There the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist, and the Anabaptist relies on the promise of the Quaker.  On leaving these free and peaceful assemblies, some proceed to the synagogue, others to the tavern....  If in England there were only one religion, its despotism would be to be dreaded; if there were only two, their followers would cut each other’s throats; but there are thirty of them, and they live in peace and happiness.’

Since we have had so much practice in tolerating one another, and in living together even when our ideas on life and the conduct of life seem absolutely incompatible, it is no wonder that we approach the treatment of international affairs in a temper very unlike the solemn and dogmatic ferocity of the German.  We do not expect or desire that other peoples shall resemble us.  The world is wide; and the world-drama is enriched by multiplicity and diversity of character.  We like bad men, if there is salt and spirit in their badness.  We even admire a brute, if he is a whole-hearted brute.  I have often thought that if the Germans had been true to their principles and their programme—­if, after proclaiming that they meant to win by sheer strength and that they recognized no other right, they had continued as they began, and had battered and hacked, burned and killed, without fear or pity, a certain reluctant admiration for them might have been felt in this country.  There is no chance of that now, since they took to whining about humanity.  Yet it is very difficult wholly to alienate the sympathies of the English people.  It is perhaps in some ways a weakness, as it is certainly in other ways a strength, that we are fanciers of other peoples.  Our soldiers have a tendency to make pets of their prisoners, to cherish them as curiosities and souvenirs.  The fancy becomes a passion when we find a little fellow