struggling valiantly against odds.  I suppose we should be at war with Germany to-day, even if the Germans had respected the neutrality of Belgium.  But the unprovoked assault upon a little people that asked only to be let alone united all opinions in this country and brought us in with a rush.  I believe there is one German, at least (I hope he is alive), who understands this.  Early in July, 1914, a German student at Oxford, who was a friend and pupil of mine, came to say good-bye to me.  I have since wondered whether he was under orders to join his regiment.  Anyhow, we talked very freely of many things, and he told me of an adventure that had befallen him in an Oxford picture-palace.  Portraits of notabilities were being thrown on the screen.  When a portrait of the German Emperor appeared, a youth, sitting just behind my friend, shouted out an insulting and scurrilous remark.  So my friend stood up and turned round and, catching him a cuff on the head, said,’That’s my emperor’.  The house was full of undergraduates, and he expected to be seized and thrown into the street.  To his great surprise the undergraduates, many of whom have now fallen on the fields of France, broke into rounds of cheering.  ‘I should like to think’, my friend said, ’that a thing like that could possibly happen in a German city, but I am afraid that the feeling there would always be against the foreigner.  I admire the English; they are so just.’  I have heard nothing of him since, except a rumour that he is with the German army of occupation in Belgium.  If so, I like to think of him at a regimental mess, suggesting doubts, or, if that is an impossible breach of military discipline, keeping silence, when the loud-voiced major explains that the sympathy of the English for Belgium is all pretence and cant.

Ideal and disinterested motives are always to be reckoned with in human nature.  What the Germans call ‘real politics’, that is to say, politics which treat disinterested motives as negligible, have led them into a morass and have bogged them there.  How easy it is to explain that the British Empire depends on trade, that we are a nation of traders, that all our policy is shaped by trade, that therefore it can only be hypocrisy in us to pretend to any of the finer feelings.  This is not, as you might suppose, the harmless sally of a one-eyed wit; it is the carefully reasoned belief of Germany’s profoundest political thinkers.  They do not understand a cavalier, so they confidently assert that there is no such thing in nature.  That is a bad mistake to make about any nation, but perhaps worst when it is made about the English, for the cavalier temper in England runs through all classes.  You can find it in the schoolmaster, the small trader, the clerk, and the labourer, as readily as in the officer of dragoons, or the Arctic explorer.  The Roundheads won the Civil War, and bequeathed to us their political achievements.  From the Cavaliers we have a more intimate bequest:  it is from them, not from the Puritans, that the fighting forces of the British Empire inherit their outlook on the world, their freedom from pedantry, and that gaiety and lightness of courage which makes them carry their lives like a feather in the cap.