things, from a distance, are now seen to have been the broken water that follows the passage of a great storm.  The real gains of Waterloo, and still more of Trafalgar, are evident in the enormous commercial and industrial development of England during the nineteenth century, and in the peaceful foundation of the great dominions of Canada, Australia, and South Africa, which was made possible only by our unchallenged use of the seas.  The men who won those two great battles did not live to gather the fruits of their victory; but their children did.  If we defeat Germany as completely as we hope, we shall not be able to point at once to our gains.  But it is not a rash forecast to say that our children and children’s children will live in greater security and freedom than we have ever tasted.

A man must have a good and wide imagination if he is to be willing to face wounds and death for the sake of his unborn descendants and kinsfolk.  We cannot count on the popular imagination being equal to the task.  Fortunately, there is a substitute for imagination which does the work as well or better, and that is character.  Our people are sound in instinct; they understand a fight.  They know that a wrestler who considers, while he is in the grip of his adversary, whether he would not do well to give over, and so put an end to the weariness and the strain, is no sort of a wrestler.  They have never failed under a strain of this kind, and they will not fail now.  The people who do the half-hearted and timid talking are either young egotists, who are angry at being deprived of their personal ease and independence; or elderly pensive gentlemen, in public offices and clubs, who are no longer fit for action, and, being denied action, fall into melancholy; or feverish journalists, who live on the proceeds of excitement, who feel the pulse and take the temperature of the War every morning, and then rush into the street to announce their fluttering hopes and fears; or cosmopolitan philosophers, to whom the change from London to Berlin means nothing but a change in diet and a pleasant addition to their opportunities of hearing good music; or aliens in heart, to whom the historic fame of England, ‘dear for her reputation through the world,’ is less than nothing; or practical jokers, who are calm and confident enough themselves, but delight in startling and depressing others.  These are not the people of England; they are the parasites of the people of England.  The people of England understand a fight.

That brings me to the first great gain of the War.  We have found ourselves.  Which of us, in the early months of 1914, would have dared to predict the splendours of the youth of this Empire—­splendours which are now a part of our history?  We are adepts at self-criticism and self-depreciation.  We hate the language of emotion.  Some of us, if we were taken to heaven and asked what we thought of it, would say that it is decent, or not so bad.  I suppose