But the German hirelings or allies had another character which (by that same strain of evil coincidence which we are tracing in this book) encouraged all that was worst in the English conservatism and inequality, while discouraging all that was best in it.  It is true that the ideal Englishman was too much of a squire; but it is just to add that the ideal squire was a good squire.  The best squire I know in fiction is Duke Theseus in “The Midsummer Night’s Dream,” who is kind to his people and proud of his dogs; and would be a perfect human being if he were not just a little bit prone to be kind to both of them in the same way.  But such natural and even pagan good-nature is consonant with the warm wet woods and comfortable clouds of South England; it never had any place among the harsh and thrifty squires in the plains of East Prussia, the land of the East Wind.  They were peevish as well as proud, and everything they created, but especially their army, was made coherent by sheer brutality.  Discipline was cruel enough in all the eighteenth-century armies, created long after the decay of any faith or hope that could hold men together.  But the state that was first in Germany was first in ferocity.  Frederick the Great had to forbid his English admirers to follow his regiments during the campaign, lest they should discover that the most enlightened of kings had only excluded torture from law to impose it without law.  This influence, as we have seen, left on Ireland a fearful mark which will never be effaced.  English rule in Ireland had been bad before; but in the broadening light of the revolutionary century I doubt whether it could have continued as bad, if we had not taken a side that forced us to flatter barbarian tyranny in Europe.  We should hardly have seen such a nightmare as the Anglicising of Ireland if we had not already seen the Germanising of England.  But even in England it was not without its effects; and one of its effects was to rouse a man who is, perhaps, the best English witness to the effect on the England of that time of the Alliance with Germany.  With that man I shall deal in the chapter that follows.

V—­The Lost England

Telling the truth about Ireland is not very pleasant to a patriotic Englishman; but it is very patriotic.  It is the truth and nothing but the truth which I have but touched on in the last chapter.  Several times, and especially at the beginning of this war, we narrowly escaped ruin because we neglected that truth, and would insist on treating our crimes of the ’98 and after as very distant; while in Irish feeling, and in fact, they are very near.  Repentance of this remote sort is not at all appropriate to the case, and will not do.  It may be a good thing to forget and forgive; but it is altogether too easy a trick to forget and be forgiven.