system where the advertiser, the sweater and usurer had a hundred
advantages over the producer and artisan, to maintain itself now
steadily at any high pitch of heroic endeavour. It had bought its
comfort with the demoralisation of its servants. It had no completely
honest organs; its spirit was clogged by its accumulated insincerities.
Brought at last face to face with a bitter hostility and a powerful and
unscrupulous enemy, an enemy socialistic, scientific and efficient to an
unexampled degree, it seemed indeed to be inspired for a time by an
unwonted energy and unanimity. Youth and the common people shone. The
sons of every class went out to fight and die, full of a splendid dream
of this war. Easy-going vanished from the foreground of the picture. But
only to creep back again as the first inspiration passed. Presently the
older men, the seasoned politicians, the owners and hucksters, the
charming women and the habitual consumers, began to recover from this
blaze of moral exaltation. Old habits of mind and procedure reasserted
themselves. The war which had begun so dramatically missed its climax;
there was neither heroic swift defeat nor heroic swift victory. There
was indecision; the most trying test of all for an undisciplined people.
There were great spaces of uneventful fatigue. Before the Battle of the
Yser had fully developed the dramatic quality had gone out of the war.
It had ceased to be either a tragedy or a triumph; for both sides it
became a monstrous strain and wasting. It had become a wearisome
thrusting against a pressure of evils....

Under that strain the dignity of England broke, and revealed a malignity
less focussed and intense than the German, but perhaps even more
distressing. No paternal government had organised the British spirit for
patriotic ends; it became now peevish and impatient, like some
ill-trained man who is sick, it directed itself no longer against the
enemy alone but fitfully against imagined traitors and shirkers; it