would naturally have followed upon a supreme display of racial vitality.  Regret, if you will, that England turned for her religion to the books of Israel; this suddenly revealed sympathy of our race with a fierce Oriental theocracy is perhaps not difficult to explain, but one cannot help wishing that its piety had taken another form; later, there had to come the “exodus from Houndsditch,” with how much conflict and misery!  Such, however, was the price of the soul’s health; we must accept the fact, and be content to see its better meaning.  Health, of course, in speaking of mankind, is always a relative term.  From the point of view of a conceivable civilization, Puritan England was lamentably ailing; but we must always ask, not how much better off a people might be, but how much worse.  Of all theological systems, the most convincing is Manicheism, which, of course, under another name, was held by the Puritans themselves.  What we call Restoration morality—­the morality, that is to say, of a king and court—­might well have become that of the nation at large under a Stuart dynasty safe from religious revolution.

The political services of Puritanism were inestimable; they will be more feelingly remembered when England has once more to face the danger of political tyranny.  I am thinking now of its effects upon social life.  To it we owe the characteristic which, in some other countries, is expressed by the term English prudery, the accusation implied being part of the general charge of hypocrisy.  It is said by observers among ourselves that the prudish habit of mind is dying out, and this is looked upon as a satisfactory thing, as a sign of healthy emancipation.  If by prude be meant a secretly vicious person who affects an excessive decorum, by all means let the prude disappear, even at the cost of some shamelessness.  If, on the other hand, a prude is one who, living a decent life, cultivates, either by bent or principle, a somewhat extreme delicacy of thought and speech with regard to elementary facts of human nature, then I say that this is most emphatically a fault in the right direction, and I have no desire to see its prevalence diminish.  On the whole, it is the latter meaning which certain foreigners have in mind when they speak of English prudery—­at all events, as exhibited by women; it being, not so much an imputation on chastity, as a charge of conceited foolishness.  An English woman who typifies the begueule may be spotless as snow; but she is presumed to have snow’s other quality, and at the same time to be a thoroughly absurd and intolerable creature.  Well, here is the point of difference.  Fastidiousness of speech is not a direct outcome of Puritanism, as our literature sufficiently proves; it is a refinement of civilization following upon absorption into the national life of all the best things which Puritanism had to teach.  We who know English women by the experience of a lifetime are well aware that their careful choice of