not master-thinking; it spends itself wholly on devising complicated means to achieve a very simple end.  That is what makes the Germans so like the animals.  Their wisdom is all cunning.  I have had German friends, two or three, in the course of my life, but none of them ever understood a word that I said if I tried to say what I thought.  You could talk to them about food, and they responded easily.  It was all very restful and pleasant, like talking to an intelligent dog.

If each of the allied nations were devoted to the creed of nationalism, the alliance could not endure.  We depend for our strength on what we hold in common.  The weakness of this wider creed is that it makes no such immediate and strong appeal to the natural instincts as is made by the mother-country.  It demands the habitual exercise of reason and imagination.  Further, seeing that we are infinitely less tame and less docile than the Germans, we depend for our strength on informing and convincing our people, and on obtaining agreement among them.  Questions which in Germany are discussed only in the gloomy Berlin head-quarters of the General Staff are discussed here in the newspapers.  In the press, even under the censorship, we think aloud.  It records our differences and debates our policy.  You could not suppress these differences and these debates without damaging our cause.  There is no freedom worth having which does not, sooner or later, include the freedom to say what you think.

No doubt we could, if necessary, carry on for a time without the press; and I agree with those newspaper writers who have been saying recently that the importance of the press is monstrously exaggerated by some of its critics.  The working-man, so far as I know him, does not depend for his patriotism on the leader-writers of the newspapers.  He takes even the news with a very large grain of salt.  ‘So the papers say’, he remarks; ‘it may be true or it may not.’  Yet the press has done good service, and might do better, in putting the meaning of the War before our people and in holding them together.  Freedom means that we must love our diversity well enough to be willing to unite to protect it.  We must die for our differences as cheerfully as the Germans die for their pattern.  Or, if we can sketch a design of our cause, we must be as passionate in defence of that large vague design as the Germans are passionate in defence of their tight uniformity and their drill.  If we were to fail to keep together, our cause, I believe, would still prevail, but at a cost that we dare not contemplate, by way of anarchy, and the dissolution of societies, by long tortures, and tears, and martyrdoms.  If we refuse to die in the ranks against the German tyranny we can keep our faith by dying at the stake.  There are those who think martyrdom the better way; and certainly that was how Christianity prevailed in Europe; you can read the story in Caxton’s translation of the Golden Legend.  But these saints and martyrs were making a beginning; we are fighting to keep what we have won, and it would be a huge failure on our part if we could keep nothing of it, but had to begin all over again.