patriotic vehemence does not serve one’s country.  Exertion is a more critical and dangerous thing than inaction, and the essence of success is in the ability to develop those qualities which make action effective, and without which strenuousness is merely a clumsy and noisy protest against inevitable defeat.  These necessary qualities, without which no community may hope for pre-eminence to-day, are a passion for fine and brilliant achievement, relentless veracity of thought and method, and richly imaginative fearlessness of enterprise.  Have we English those qualities, and are we doing our utmost to select and develop them?

I doubt very much if we are.  Let me give some of the impressions that qualify my assurance in the future of our race.

I have watched a great deal of patriotic effort during the last decade, I have seen enormous expenditures of will, emotion and material for the sake of our future, and I am deeply impressed, not indeed by any effect of lethargy, but by the second-rate quality and the shortness and weakness of aim in very much that has been done.  I miss continually that sharply critical imaginativeness which distinguishes all excellent work, which shines out supremely in Cromwell’s creation of the New Model, or Nelson’s plan of action at Trafalgar, as brightly as it does in Newton’s investigation of gravitation, Turner’s rendering of landscape, or Shakespeare’s choice of words, but which cannot be absent altogether if any achievement is to endure.  We seem to have busy, energetic people, no doubt, in abundance, patient and industrious administrators and legislators; but have we any adequate supply of really creative ability?

Let me apply this question to one matter upon which England has certainly been profoundly in earnest during the last decade.  We have been almost frantically resolved to keep the empire of the sea.  But have we really done all that could have been done?  I ask it with all diffidence, but has our naval preparation been free from a sort of noisy violence, a certain massive dullness of conception?  Have we really made anything like a sane use of our resources?  I do not mean of our resources in money or stuff.  It is manifest that the next naval war will be beyond all precedent a war of mechanisms, giving such scope for invention and scientifically equipped wit and courage as the world has never had before.  Now, have we really developed any considerable proportion of the potential human quality available to meet the demand for wits?  What are we doing to discover, encourage and develop those supreme qualities of personal genius that become more and more decisive with every new weapon and every new complication and unsuspected possibility it introduces?  Suppose, for example, there was among us to-day a one-eyed, one-armed adulterer, rather fragile, prone to sea-sickness, and with just that one supreme quality of imaginative courage which made Nelson our starry admiral.  Would he be given the ghost of a chance now of putting that gift at his country’s disposal?  I do not think he would, and I do not think he would because we underrate gifts and exceptional qualities, because there is no quickening appreciation for the exceptional best in a man, and because we overvalue the good behaviour, the sound physique, the commonplace virtues of mediocrity.