ribaldry of France.  But nobody could possibly pretend that Bismarck was more pious and simple than Hans Andersen; yet the Carlyleans looked on with silence or approval while the innocent toy kingdom was broken like a toy.  Here again, it is enormously probable that England would have struck upon the right side, if the English people had been the English Government.  Among other coincidences, the Danish princess who had married the English heir was something very like a fairy princess to the English crowd.  The national poet had hailed her as a daughter of the sea-kings; and she was, and indeed still is, the most popular royal figure in England.  But whatever our people may have been like, our politicians were on the very tamest level of timidity and the fear of force to which they have ever sunk.  The Tin Soldier of the Danish army and the paper boat of the Danish navy, as in the story, were swept away down the great gutter, down that colossal cloaca that leads to the vast cesspool of Berlin.

Why, as a fact, did not England interpose?  There were a great many reasons given, but I think they were all various inferences from one reason; indirect results and sometimes quite illogical results, of what we have called the Germanisation of England.  First, the very insularity on which we insisted was barbaric, in its refusal of a seat in the central senate of the nations.  What we called our splendid isolation became a rather ignominious sleeping-partnership with Prussia.  Next, we were largely trained in irresponsibility by our contemporary historians, Freeman and Green, teaching us to be proud of a possible descent from King Arthur’s nameless enemies and not from King Arthur.  King Arthur might not be historical, but at least he was legendary.  Hengist and Horsa were not even legendary, for they left no legend.  Anybody could see what was obligatory on the representative of Arthur; he was bound to be chivalrous, that is, to be European.  But nobody could imagine what was obligatory on the representative of Horsa, unless it were to be horsy.  That was perhaps the only part of the Anglo-Saxon programme that the contemporary English really carried out.  Then, in the very real decline from Cobbett to Cobden (that is, from a broad to a narrow manliness and good sense) there had grown up the cult of a very curious kind of peace, to be spread all over the world not by pilgrims, but by pedlars.  Mystics from the beginning had made vows of peace—­but they added to them vows of poverty.  Vows of poverty were not in the Cobdenite’s line.  Then, again, there was the positive praise of Prussia, to which steadily worsening case the Carlyleans were already committed.  But beyond these, there was something else, a spirit which had more infected us as a whole.  That spirit was the spirit of Hamlet.  We gave the grand name of “evolution” to a notion that things do themselves.  Our wealth, our insularity, our gradual loss of faith, had so dazed us that the old Christian England haunted us like a ghost in whom we could not quite believe.  An aristocrat like Palmerston, loving freedom and hating the upstart despotism, must have looked on at its cold brutality not without that ugly question which Hamlet asked himself—­am I a coward?