a rich man, has now given it irrevocably to the nation for the use of disabled soldiers, together with as much land as may suffice a farm colony chosen from among them.  The beautiful hospital of 250 beds at Paignton, in North Devon, run entirely by women of American birth now resident in Great Britain, without any financial aid from the British Government, was another large country house given to the service of the wounded by Mr. Singer.  Lady Sheffield’s hospital for 25 beds at Alderley Park is an example of how part of a country house with all its green and restful surroundings may be used for those who have suffered in the war, and it has many fellows in all parts of England.  Altogether about 700 country houses, large and small, have been offered to the War Office.

But money and houses are the very least part of what the old families, the rich manufacturers, or the educated class generally have offered to their country in this war.  Democracy has gone far with us, but it may still be said that the young heir to a great name, to estates with which his family has been connected for generations, and to the accumulated “consideration” to use a French word in a French sense, which such a position almost always carries with it—­has a golden time in English life.  Difficulties that check others fall away from him; he is smiled upon for his kindred’s sake before he makes friends for his own; the world is overkind to his virtues and blind to his faults; he enters manhood indeed as “one of our conquerors”; and it will cost him some trouble to throw away his advantages.  Before the war such a youth was the common butt of the Socialist orator.  He was the typical “shirker” and “loafer,” while other men worked; the parasite bred from the sweat of the poor; the soft, effeminate creature who had never faced the facts of life and never would.  As to his soldiering—­the common profession of so many of his kind—­that was only another offence in the eyes of politicians like Mr. Keir Hardie.  When the class war came, he would naturally he found shooting down the workmen; but for any other war, an ignorant popinjay!—­incompetent even at his own trade, and no match whatever for the scientific soldier of the Continent.

Those who knew anything of the Army were well aware long before 1914 that this type of officer—­if he still existed, as no doubt he had once existed—­had become extraordinarily rare; that since the Boer War, the level of education in the Army, the standard of work demanded, the quality of the relations between officers and men had all steadily advanced.  And with regard to the young men of the “classes” in general, those who had to do with them, at school and college, while fully alive to their weaknesses, yet cherished convictions which were more instinct than anything else, as to what stuff these easy-going, sport-loving fellows might prove to be made of in case of emergency.