Like many Britons Mr. Britling had that touch of patriotic feeling towards America which takes the form of impatient criticism.  No one in Britain ever calls an American a foreigner.  To see faults in Germany or Spain is to tap boundless fountains of charity; but the faults of America rankle in an English mind almost as much as the faults of England.  Mr. Britling could explain away the faults of England readily enough; our Hanoverian monarchy, our Established Church and its deadening effect on education, our imperial obligations and the strain they made upon our supplies of administrative talent were all very serviceable for that purpose.  But there in America was the old race, without Crown or Church or international embarrassment, and it was still falling short of splendid.  His speech to Mr. Direck had the rancour of a family quarrel.  Let me only give a few sentences that were to stick in Mr. Direck’s memory.

“You think you are out of it for good and all.  So did we think.  We were as smug as you are when France went down in ’71....  Yours is only one further degree of insularity.  You think this vacuous aloofness of yours is some sort of moral superiority.  So did we, so did we....

“It won’t last you ten years if we go down....

“Do you think that our disaster will leave the Atlantic for you?  Do you fancy there is any Freedom of the Seas possible beyond such freedom as we maintain, except the freedom to attack you?  For forty years the British fleet has guarded all America from European attack.  Your Monroe doctrine skulks behind it now....

“I’m sick of this high thin talk of yours about the war....  You are a nation of ungenerous onlookers—­watching us throttle or be throttled.  You gamble on our winning.  And we shall win; we shall win.  And you will profit.  And when we have won a victory only one shade less terrible than defeat, then you think you will come in and tinker with our peace.  Bleed us a little more to please your hyphenated patriots....”

He came to his last shaft.  “You talk of your New Ideals of Peace.  You say that you are too proud to fight.  But your business men in New York give the show away.  There’s a little printed card now in half the offices in New York that tells of the real pacificism of America.  They’re busy, you know.  Trade’s real good.  And so as not to interrupt it they stick up this card:  ‘Nix on the war!’ Think of it!—­’Nix on the war!’ Here is the whole fate of mankind at stake, and America’s contribution is a little grumbling when the Germans sank the Lusitania, and no end of grumbling when we hold up a ship or two and some fool of a harbour-master makes an overcharge.  Otherwise—­’Nix on the war!’...

“Well, let it be Nix on the war!  Don’t come here and talk to me!  You who were searching registers a year ago to find your Essex kin.  Let it be Nix!  Explanations!  What do I want with explanations?  And”—­he mocked his guest’s accent and his guest’s mode of thought—­“dif’cult prap’sitions.”