dislike such verbose compromise more than downright plotting.  It is simply the fact that Englishmen like Grey are open to Mr. Shaw’s attack and are not open to yours.  It is not true that the English were sufficiently clearheaded or self-controlled to conspire for the destruction of Germany.  Any man who knows England, any man who hates England as one hates a living thing, will tell you it is not true.  The English may be snobs, they may be plutocrats, they may be hypocrites, but they are not, as a fact, plotters; and I gravely doubt whether they could be if they wanted to.  The mass of the people are perfectly incapable of plotting at all, and if the small ring of rich people who finance our politics were plotting for anything, it was for peace at almost any price.  Any Londoner who knows the London streets and newspapers as he knows the Nelson column or the Inner Circle, knows that there were men in the governing class and in the Cabinet who were literally thirsting to defend Germany until Germany, by her own act, became indefensible.  If they said nothing in support of the tearing up of the promise of peace to Belgium, it is simply because there was nothing to be said.

You were the first people to talk about World-Politics; and the first people to disregard them altogether.  Even your foreign policy is domestic policy.  It does not even apply to any people who are not Germans; and of your wild guesses about some twenty other peoples, not one has gone right even by accident.  Your two or three shots at my own not immaculate land have been such that you would have been much nearer the truth if you had tried to invade England by crossing the Caucasus, or to discover England among the South Sea Islands.  With your first delusion, that our courage was calculated and malignant when in truth our very corruption was timid and confused, I have already dealt.  The case is the same with your second favourite phrase; that the British army is mercenary.  You learnt it in books and not in battlefields; and I should like to be present at a scene in which you tried to bribe the most miserable little loafer in Hammersmith as if he were a cynical condottiere selling his spear to some foreign city.  It is not the fact, my dear sir.  You have been misinformed.  The British Army is not at this moment a hireling army any more than it is a conscript army.  It is a volunteer army in the strict sense of the word; nor do I object to your calling it an amateur army.  There is no compulsion, and there is next to no pay.  It is at this moment drawn from every class of the community, and there are very few classes which would not earn a little more money in their ordinary trades.  It numbers very nearly as many men as it would if it were a conscript army; that is with the necessary margin of men unable to serve or needed to serve otherwise.  Ours is a country in which that democratic spirit which is common to Christendom is rather unusually sluggish and far below the surface.  And the most