existence; but that was all. In their daily life, or national ideals,
or habit of mind, he took not the slightest interest, and said so,
especially to foreigners.

"I'm English," he would explain, with a certain proud humility.
"That's good enough for yours truly!"

This sort of thing rather perplexed the American people, who take a
keen and intelligent interest in the affairs of other nations.

But to-day the average Briton would not speak like that. He will never
speak like that again. He has been outside his own island: he has made
a number of new acquaintances. He has been fighting alongside of the
French, and has made the discovery that they do not subsist entirely
upon frogs. He has encountered real Germans, at sufficiently close
quarters to realize that the "German Menace" at which his party
leaders encouraged him to scoff in a bygone age was no such phantom
after all. Altogether he is a very different person from the
complacent, parochial exponent of the tight-little-island theories of
yester-year. He has encountered things at home and abroad which have
purged his very soul. Abroad, he has seen the whole of Belgium and
some of the fairest provinces of France subjected to the grossest and
most bestial barbarity. At home, he has seen inoffensive watering
places bombarded by pirate craft which came up out of the sea like
malignant wraiths and then fled away like panic-stricken
window-smashers. He has seen Zeppelins hovering over close-packed
working-class districts in industrial towns, raining indiscriminate
destruction upon men, women, and children. In fact, he has seen things
and suffered things that he never even dreamed of, and they have
broadened his mind considerably.