hate that will outlive this generation, and will make the small peoples
whom she has kicked and trampled on impossible subjects of the German
Empire. Worst of all it has suggested to onlookers that the people who
have so plenary a belief in frightfulness are not themselves strangers
to fear. There is an old English proverb, hackneyed and stale three
hundred years ago, but now freshened again by disuse, that the goodwife
would never have looked for her daughter in the oven unless she had been
there herself.

How shall I describe the English temper, which the Germans, high and
low, learned and ignorant, have so profoundly mistaken? You can get no
description of it from the Englishman pure and simple; he has no theory
of himself, and it bores him to hear himself described. Yet it is this
temper which has given England her great place in the world and which
has cemented the British Empire. It is to be found not in England alone,
but wherever there is a strain of English blood or an acceptance of
English institutions. You can find it in Australia, in Canada, in
America; it infects Scotland, and impresses Wales. It is everywhere in
our trenches to-day. It is not clannish, or even national, it is
essentially the lonely temper of a man independent to the verge of
melancholy. An admirable French writer of to-day has said that the best
handbook and guide to the English temper is Defoe's romance of _Robinson
Crusoe_. Crusoe is practical, but is conscious of the over-shadowing
presence of the things that are greater than man. He makes his own
clothing, teaches his goats to dance, and wrestles in thought with the
problems suggested by his Bible. Another example of the same temper may
be seen in Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_, and yet another in
Wordsworth's _Prelude_. There is no danger that English thought will
ever underestimate the value and meaning of the individual soul. The
greatest English literature, it might almost be said, from Shakespeare's