The other day I was talking to an eminent Anglican among various other people and someone with an eye to him propounded this remarkable view.

“There are four stages between belief and utter unbelief.  There are those who believe in God, those who doubt like Huxley the Agnostic, those who deny him like the Atheists but who do at least keep his place vacant, and lastly those who have set up a Church in his place.  That is the last outrage of unbelief.”

IV.  THE RIDDLE OF THE BRITISH

All the French people I met in France seemed to be thinking and talking about the English.  The English bring their own atmosphere with them; to begin with they are not so talkative, and I did not find among them anything like the same vigour of examination, the same resolve to understand the Anglo-French reaction, that I found among the French.  In intellectual processes I will confess that my sympathies are undisguisedly with the French; the English will never think nor talk clearly until the get clerical “Greek” and sham “humanities” out of their public schools and sincere study and genuine humanities in; our disingenuous Anglican compromise is like a cold in the English head, and the higher education in England is a training in evasion.  This is an always lamentable state of affairs, but just now it is particularly lamentable because quite tremendous opportunities for the good of mankind turn on the possibility of a thorough and entirely frank mutual understanding between French, Italians, and English.  For years there has been a considerable amount of systematic study in France of English thought and English developments.  Upon almost any question of current English opinion and upon most current English social questions, the best studies are in French.  But there has been little or no reciprocal activity.  The English in France seem to confine their French studies to La Vie Parisienne. It is what they have been led to expect of French literature.

There can be no doubt in any reasonable mind that this war is binding France and England very closely together.  They dare not quarrel for the next fifty years.  They are bound to play a central part in the World League for the Preservation of Peace that must follow this struggle.  There is no question of their practical union.  It is a thing that must be.  But it is remarkable that while the French mind is agog to apprehend every fact and detail it can about the British, to make the wisest and fullest use of our binding necessities, that strange English “incuria”—­to use the new slang—­attains to its most monumental in this matter.