The disposition shown by an endless number of such incidents is something more than a disposition of gratitude of a people helped when they are hard pressed.  All these things show the changed and changing Englishman.  It has already come to him that he may be weaker than he had thought himself and that he may need friends more than he had once imagined; and, if he must have helpers and friends, he’d rather have his own kinsmen.  He’s a queer “cuss,” this Englishman.  But he isn’t a liar nor a coward nor any sort of “a yellow dog.”  He’s true, and he never runs—­a possible hero any day, and, when heroic, modest and quiet and graceful.  The trouble with him has been that he got great world power too easily.  In the times when he exploited the world for his own enrichment, there were no other successful exploiters.  It became an easy game to him.  He organized sea traffic and sea power.  Of course he became rich—­far, far richer than anybody else, and, therefore, content with himself.  He has, therefore, kept much of his mediaeval impedimenta, his dukes and marquesses and all that they imply—­his outworn ceremonies and his mediaeval disregard of his social inferiors.  Nothing is well done in this Kingdom for the big public, but only for the classes.  The railway stations have no warm waiting rooms.  The people pace the platform till the train comes, and milord sits snugly wrapt up in his carriage till his footman announces the approach of the train.  And occasional discontent is relieved by emigration to the Colonies.  If any man becomes weary of his restrictions he may go to Australia and become a gentleman.  The remarkable loyalty of the Colonies has in it something of a servant’s devotion to his old master.

Now this trying time of war and the threat and danger of extinction are bringing—­have in fact already brought—­the conviction that many changes must come.  The first sensible talk about popular education ever heard here is just now beginning.  Many a gentleman has made up his mind to try to do with less than seventeen servants for the rest of his life since he now has to do with less.  Privilege, on which so large a part of life here rests, is already pretty well shot to pieces.  A lot of old baggage will never be recovered after this war:  that’s certain.  During a little after-dinner speech in a club not long ago I indulged in a pleasantry about excessive impedimenta.  Lord Derby, Minister of War and a bluff and honest aristocrat, sat near me and he whispered to me—­“That’s me.”  “Yes,” I said, “that’s you,” and the group about us made merry at the jest.  The meaning of this is, they now joke about what was the most solemn thing in life three years ago.