Too long had British life been corrupted by the fictions of loyalty to an uninspiring and alien Court, of national piety in an official Church, of freedom in a politician-rigged State, of justice in an economic system where the advertiser, the sweater and usurer had a hundred advantages over the producer and artisan, to maintain itself now steadily at any high pitch of heroic endeavour.  It had bought its comfort with the demoralisation of its servants.  It had no completely honest organs; its spirit was clogged by its accumulated insincerities.  Brought at last face to face with a bitter hostility and a powerful and unscrupulous enemy, an enemy socialistic, scientific and efficient to an unexampled degree, it seemed indeed to be inspired for a time by an unwonted energy and unanimity.  Youth and the common people shone.  The sons of every class went out to fight and die, full of a splendid dream of this war.  Easy-going vanished from the foreground of the picture.  But only to creep back again as the first inspiration passed.  Presently the older men, the seasoned politicians, the owners and hucksters, the charming women and the habitual consumers, began to recover from this blaze of moral exaltation.  Old habits of mind and procedure reasserted themselves.  The war which had begun so dramatically missed its climax; there was neither heroic swift defeat nor heroic swift victory.  There was indecision; the most trying test of all for an undisciplined people.  There were great spaces of uneventful fatigue.  Before the Battle of the Yser had fully developed the dramatic quality had gone out of the war.  It had ceased to be either a tragedy or a triumph; for both sides it became a monstrous strain and wasting.  It had become a wearisome thrusting against a pressure of evils....

Under that strain the dignity of England broke, and revealed a malignity less focussed and intense than the German, but perhaps even more distressing.  No paternal government had organised the British spirit for patriotic ends; it became now peevish and impatient, like some ill-trained man who is sick, it directed itself no longer against the enemy alone but fitfully against imagined traitors and shirkers; it wasted its energies in a deepening and spreading net of internal squabbles and accusations.  Now it was the wily indolence of the Prime Minister, now it was the German culture of the Lord Chancellor, now the imaginative enterprise of the First Lord of the Admiralty that focussed a vindictive campaign.  There began a hunt for spies and of suspects of German origin in every quarter except the highest; a denunciation now of “traitors,” now of people with imaginations, now of scientific men, now of the personal friend of the Commander-in-Chief, now of this group and then of that group....  Every day Mr. Britling read his three or four newspapers with a deepening disappointment.

When he turned from the newspaper to his post, he would find the anonymous letter-writer had been busy....