For I think the first, perhaps the only, fruitful work an Englishman can do now for the formation of foreign opinion is to talk about what he really understands, the condition of British opinion.  It is as simple as it is solid.  For the first time, perhaps, what we call the United Kingdom entirely deserves its name.  There has been nothing like such unanimity within an Englishman’s recollection.  The Irish and even the Welsh were largely pro-Boers, so were some of the most English of the English.  No one could have been more English than Fox, yet he denounced the war with Napoleon.  No one could be more English than Cobden, but he denounced the war in the Crimea.  It is really extraordinary to find a united England.  Indeed, until lately, it was extraordinary to find a united Englishman.  Those of us who, like the present writer, repudiated the South African war from its beginnings, had yet a divided heart in the matter, and felt certain aspects of it as glorious as well as infamous.  The first fact I can offer you is the unquestionable fact that all these doubts and divisions have ceased.  Nor have they ceased by any compromise; but by a universal flash of faith—­or, if you will, of suspicion.  Nor were our internal conflicts lightly abandoned; nor our reconciliations an easy matter.  I am, as you are, a democrat and a citizen of Europe; and my friends and I had grown to loathe the plutocracy and privilege which sat in the high places of our country with a loathing which we thought no love could cast out.  Of these rich men I will not speak here; with your permission, I will not think of them.  War is a terrible business in any case; and to some intellectual temperaments this is the most terrible part of it.  That war takes the young; that war sunders the lovers; that all over Europe brides and bridegrooms are parting at the church door:  all that is only a commonplace to commonplace people.  To give up one’s love for one’s country is very great.  But to give up one’s hate for one’s country, this may also have in it something of pride and something of purification.

What is it that has made the British peoples thus defer not only their artificial parade of party politics but their real social and moral complaints and demands?  What is it that has united all of us against the Prussian, as against a mad dog?  It is the presence of a certain spirit, as unmistakable as a pungent smell, which we feel is capable of withering all the good things in this world.  The burglary of Belgium, the bribe to betray France, these are not excuses; they are facts.  But they are only the facts by which we came to know of the presence of the spirit.  They do not suffice to define the whole spirit itself.  A good rough summary is to say that it is the spirit of barbarism; but indeed it is something worse.  It is the spirit of second-rate civilisation; and the distinction involves the most important differences.  Granted that it could exist, pure barbarism could not last long; as pure babyhood cannot last long.  Of his own nature the baby is interested in the ticking of a watch; and the time will come when you will have to tell him, if you only tell him the wrong time.  And that is exactly what the second-rate civilisation does.