officials, instead of to English ones? French and Italians do our
cooking, Germans manage our music, Jews control our money markets;
surely it would make little difference to us for France, Russia, or
Germany to undertake our government. The worst of being conquered by
Russia would be the necessity of learning Russian; whereas a little
rubbing up of our French would make us comfortable with France. Besides,
to be conquered by France would save us crossing the Channel to Paris,
and then we might hope for cafés in Regent Street, and an emancipated
literature. As a matter of fact, so-called national interests are merely
certain private interests on a large scale, the private interests of
financiers, ambitious politicians, soldiers, and great merchants.
Broadly speaking, there are no rival nations--there are rival markets;
and it is its Board of Trade and its Stock Exchange rather than its
Houses of Parliament that virtually govern a country. Thus one seaport
goes down and another comes up, industries forsake one country to bless
another, the military and naval strengths of nations fluctuate this way
and that; and to those whom these changes affect they are undoubtedly
important matters--the great capitalist, the soldier, and the
politician; but to the quiet man at home with his wife, his children,
his books, and his flowers, to the artist busied with brave translunary
matters, to the saint with his eyes filled with 'the white radiance of
eternity,' to the shepherd on the hillside, the milkmaid in love, or the
angler at his sport--what are these pompous commotions, these busy,
bustling mimicries of reality? England will be just as good to live in
though men some day call her France. Let the big busybodies divide her
amongst them as they like, so that they leave one alone with one's fair
share of the sky and the grass, and an occasional, not too vociferous,
nightingale.

The reader will perhaps forgive the hackneyed references to Sir Thomas