greater security and freedom than we have ever tasted.

A man must have a good and wide imagination if he is to be willing to
face wounds and death for the sake of his unborn descendants and
kinsfolk. We cannot count on the popular imagination being equal to the
task. Fortunately, there is a substitute for imagination which does the
work as well or better, and that is character. Our people are sound in
instinct; they understand a fight. They know that a wrestler who
considers, while he is in the grip of his adversary, whether he would
not do well to give over, and so put an end to the weariness and the
strain, is no sort of a wrestler. They have never failed under a strain
of this kind, and they will not fail now. The people who do the
half-hearted and timid talking are either young egotists, who are angry
at being deprived of their personal ease and independence; or elderly
pensive gentlemen, in public offices and clubs, who are no longer fit
for action, and, being denied action, fall into melancholy; or feverish
journalists, who live on the proceeds of excitement, who feel the pulse
and take the temperature of the War every morning, and then rush into
the street to announce their fluttering hopes and fears; or cosmopolitan
philosophers, to whom the change from London to Berlin means nothing but
a change in diet and a pleasant addition to their opportunities of
hearing good music; or aliens in heart, to whom the historic fame of
England, 'dear for her reputation through the world,' is less than
nothing; or practical jokers, who are calm and confident enough
themselves, but delight in startling and depressing others. These are
not the people of England; they are the parasites of the people of
England. The people of England understand a fight.

That brings me to the first great gain of the War. We have found
ourselves. Which of us, in the early months of 1914, would have dared