FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND THE PRESS.

ABSENCE OF COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE.

These, the outcome of the quiet and stable home life of an island people, have done more than anything to make the Englishman a deceptive personality to the outside eye.  He has for centuries been permitted to grumble.  There is no such confirmed grumbler—­until he really has something to grumble at, and then no one who grumbles less.  There is no such confirmed carper at the condition of his country, yet no one really so profoundly convinced of its perfection.  A stranger might well think from his utterances that he was spoiled by the freedom of his life, unprepared to sacrifice anything for a land in such a condition.  Threaten that country, and with it his liberty, and you will find that his grumbles have meant less than nothing.  You will find, too, that behind the apparent slackness of every arrangement and every individual are powers of adaptability to facts, elasticity, practical genius, a latent spirit of competition and a determination that are staggering.  Before this war began it was the fashion among a number of English to lament the decadence of the race.  These very grumblers are now foremost in praising, and quite rightly, the spirit shown in every part of their country.  Their lamentations, which plentifully deceived the outside ear, were just English grumbles, for if in truth England had been decadent there could have been no such universal display for them to be praising now.  But all this democratic grumbling and habit of “going as you please” serve a deep purpose.  Autocracy, censorship, compulsion destroy humor in a nation’s blood and elasticity in its fibre; they cut at the very mainsprings of national vitality.  Only free from these baneful controls can each man arrive in his own way at realization of what is or is not national necessity; only free from them will each man truly identify himself with a national ideal—­not through deliberate instruction or by command of others, but by simple, natural conviction from within.

Two cautions are here given to the stranger trying to form an estimate of the Englishman:  The creature must not be judged from his press, which, manned (with certain exceptions) by those who are not typically English, is too highly colored altogether to illustrate the true English spirit; nor can he be judged by such of his literature as is best known on the Continent.  The Englishman proper is inexpressive, unexpressed.  Further, he must be judged by the evidences of his wealth.  England may be the richest country in the world per head of population, but not 5 per cent. of that population have any wealth to speak of, certainly not enough to have affected their hardihood, and, with inconsiderable exceptions, those who have enough are brought up to worship hardihood.  For the vast proportion of young Englishmen active military service is merely a change from work as hard, and more monotonous.