a generation or so.  They quarrel and shirk and lay blame exactly as bad servants do—­and things are still far too much in their hands.  Things are getting muffed, there can be no doubt about that—­not fatally, but still rather seriously.  And the government—­it was human before the war, and we’ve added no archangels.  There’s muddle.  There’s mutual suspicion.  You never know what newspaper office Lloyd George won’t be in touch with next.  He’s honest and patriotic and energetic, but he’s mortally afraid of old women and class intrigues.  He doesn’t know where to get his backing.  He’s got all a labour member’s terror of the dagger at his back.  There’s a lack of nerve, too, in getting rid of prominent officers—­who have friends.”

The staff officer nodded.

“Northcliffe seems to me to have a case,” said Mr. Britling.  “Every one abuses him.”

“I’d stop his Daily Mail,” said Raeburn.  “I’d leave The Times, but I’d stop the Daily Mail on the score of its placards alone.  It overdoes Northcliffe.  It translates him into the shrieks and yells of underlings.  The plain fact is that Northcliffe is scared out of his wits by German efficiency—­and in war time when a man is scared out of his wits, whether he is honest or not, you put his head in a bag or hold a pistol to it to calm him....  What is the good of all this clamouring for a change of government?  We haven’t a change of government.  It’s like telling a tramp to get a change of linen.  Our men, all our public men, are second-rate men, with the habits of advocates.  There is nothing masterful in their minds.  How can you expect the system to produce anything else?  But they are doing as well as they can, and there is no way of putting in any one else now, and there you are.”

“Meanwhile,” said Mr. Britling, “our boys—­get killed.”

“They’d get killed all the more if you had—­let us say—­Carson and Lloyd George and Northcliffe and Lady Frensham, with, I suppose, Austin Harrison and Horatio Bottomley thrown in—­as a Strong Silent Government....  I’d rather have Northcliffe as dictator than that....  We can’t suddenly go back on the past and alter our type.  We didn’t listen to Matthew Arnold.  We’ve never thoroughly turned out and cleaned up our higher schools.  We’ve resisted instruction.  We’ve preferred to maintain our national luxuries of a bench of bishops and party politics.  And compulsory Greek and the university sneer.  And Lady Frensham.  And all that sort of thing.  And here we are!...  Well, damn it, we’re in for it now; we’ve got to plough through with it—­with what we have—­as what we are.”

The young staff officer nodded.  He thought that was “about it.”

“You’ve got no sons,” said Mr. Britling.

“I’m not even married,” said Raeburn, as though he thanked God.