Some of the shallower natures find a substitute for action in speech.  If only they talk loud enough and long enough, they feel that they are doing something valuable towards the desired end, and they find others, still weaker than themselves, who take their words at their own valuation.  Who does not recall moments of the present war when the man-in-the-street has exclaimed, “That was a splendid speech of Blower’s!  I feel now that we are on the right line”; or, “After what Bellowell said last night, there can be no going back to the discredited policy”?  The man-in-the-street did not realize that Blower’s words are only articulated air, or that Bellowell could speak with equal effect whether his brief were to defend Belgium or to annex her.  But alike the Englishman who acts and the Englishman who talks look askance on the people who think.  Our national history is a history of action, in religion, in politics, in war, in discovery.  It is only now and then that an Englishman can allow himself a moment for contemplation, for the endeavour to “see into the life of things,” for contact with those spiritual realities of which phenomena are only the shadows.  Burke did it, but then he was an Irishman.  Lord Beaconsfield did it, but then he was a Jew.  Gladstone did it, but then he was a Scotsman.  May I add that the present Prime Minister does it, but then he is a Welshman?  Englishmen, as a rule, are absorbed in action; it is to them a religion, and it takes the place of a philosophy.

At this moment all England is acting, from the King and the War Cabinet to the children who play at soldiers in the gutter.  There is no distinction of class, or sex, or temperament.  All alike feel that they must be doing something to win the war, and that they would die or go mad if they were restrained from action.  Limitations, physical or mental, incapacities for effort, restrictions of opportunity, gall as they never galled before.  To compare great things with small, the whole nation pulsates with the spirit of the fiercely contested cricket-match: 

  “Oh, good lads in the field they were,
     Laboured and ran and threw;
   But we that sat on the benches there
     Had the hardest work to do!”

Action, then, is the creed and the consolation of the English race, and God forbid that we should disparage that on which national salvation depends.  The war must be won by action; but in the strain and stress of these tremendous days we are tempted to forget that there is something to be won or lost besides the war.  It is possible to conquer on the Western front, and at the same time to be defeated on the not less important field of moral being.  The promise which heads this paper was uttered in full view of an impending agony which should crush religion and civilization into powder.  We can realize the consternation with which a patriotic audience heard those premonitions from the lips of a patriotic Teacher; but in the midst of all that was harrowing and heart-rending came the promise of triumph through endurance.  “Ye shall make your souls your own.”  The gloomy and the cheerful prediction were alike made good.