If you are a pernickety intellectual (soi-disant) you may really permit yourself to be faintly amused at the fiery zeal of the mystery-wrapt author of Loyalty for his (or, quite possibly, her) country’s cause in this difficult hour.  If you are cast in the common human mould that nowadays is seen for the glorious thing it is, you will respond to many single-minded, wholesome thoughts in the impassioned statement of his thesis.  And if you happen to belong to that simple discredited breed, the English, so long overshadowed by the nimbler Britons, you may have quite a nice little private thrill of your own, a thrill of pride in your precious stone, and begin to think with seriousness of the advantages of “home rule all round” in an England-for-the-English mood, and of the value of a nationalism that is as irrational as conjugal or mother love—­and as fine.

The author’s hero is an Englishman of the wandering type, assistant editor on a crank paper.  The play is a protracted debate in four sessions, June, 1914; July, 1914; August, 1914; September, 1916.  And here the author makes his most serious mistake, the mistake made by Mr. HENRY ARTHUR JONES in his recent squib.  If he had contrived his Little Navy folk, the proprietor, editor and revolving cranks as something more than mere caricatures, brands of straw prepared for his consuming bonfires, he would have strengthened, not weakened, his excellent case.  He has quoted his enemies’ mistakes without their excuses, their texts without their contexts.  And that is a form of propaganda which can only touch the converted, or such of them as are not stirred by a sporting instinct to a certain mood of protest and a wish that the other fellow should be given a better start in the heresy hunt.

The dramatis personae, then, divide themselves into the men of straw and the right sort.  Of the former you have first Sir Andrew Craig, chairman of the party in his constituency and editor of The New Standard (there were indeed altogether new standards of efficiency, mentality and hospitality in that rather imaginative newspaper office of the First Act).  Mr. FISHER WHITE gave us the courtly-obstinate old man to the life (this player has a way of removing straw).  In the dramatic passage in which, returning after being broken in a German prison, he relates some of the horrors of which it is good for us to be reminded, he rose to the height of his fine talent.  His exquisite elocution—­a remarkable feat of virtuosity—­was in itself a sheer delight.

Mr. Stutchbury, the editor, pacifist and sentimental democrat, was dealt to Mr. LENNOX PAWLE.  He played his hand well.  There was never such an editor outside Bedlam; but Mr. PAWLE is a resourceful person and by a score of clever tricks of gesture and business made a reasonable figure of fun for our obloquy.  All but broken in the end, but still claiming that he had “the larger vision” (as he certainly