at?  We were drifting lazily towards a real disaster.  We had a government that seemed guided by the principles of Mr. Micawber, and adopted for its watchword “Wait and see.”  For months now this trouble had grown more threatening.  Suppose presently that civil war broke out in Ireland!  Suppose presently that these irritated, mishandled suffragettes did some desperate irreconcilable thing, assassinated for example!  The bomb in Westminster Abbey the other day might have killed a dozen people....  Suppose the smouldering criticism of British rule in India and Egypt were fanned by administrative indiscretions into a flame....

And then suppose Germany had made trouble....

Usually Mr. Britling kept his mind off Germany.  In the daytime he pretended Germany meant nothing to England.  He hated alarmists.  He hated disagreeable possibilities.  He declared the idea of a whole vast nation waiting to strike at us incredible.  Why should they?  You cannot have seventy million lunatics....  But in the darkness of the night one cannot dismiss things in this way.  Suppose, after all, their army was more than a parade, their navy more than a protest?

We might be caught—­It was only in the vast melancholia of such occasions that Mr. Britling would admit such possibilities, but we might be caught by some sudden declaration of war....  And how should we face it?

He recalled the afternoon’s talk at Claverings and such samples of our governmental machinery as he chanced to number among his personal acquaintance.  Suppose suddenly the enemy struck!  With Raeburn and his friends to defend us!  Or if the shock tumbled them out of power, then with these vituperative Tories, these spiteful advocates of weak tyrannies and privileged pretences in the place of them.  There was no leadership in England.  In the lucid darkness he knew that with a terrible certitude.  He had a horrible vision of things disastrously muffled; of Lady Frensham and her Morning Post friends first garrulously and maliciously “patriotic,” screaming her way with incalculable mischiefs through the storm, and finally discovering that the Germans were the real aristocrats and organising our national capitulation on that understanding.  He knew from talk he had heard that the navy was weak in mines and torpedoes, unprovided with the great monitors needed for a war with Germany; torn by doctrinaire feuds; nevertheless the sea power was our only defence.  In the whole country we might muster a military miscellany of perhaps three hundred thousand men.  And he had no faith in their equipment, in their direction.  General French, the one man who had his entire confidence, had been forced to resign through some lawyer’s misunderstanding about the Irish difficulty.  He did not believe any plans existed for such a war as Germany might force upon us, any calculation, any foresight of the thing at all.

Why had we no foresight?  Why had we this wilful blindness to disagreeable possibilities?  Why did we lie so open to the unexpected crisis?  Just what he said of himself he said also of his country.  It was curious to remember that.  To realise how closely Dower House could play the microcosm to the whole Empire....