It becomes more and more imperative that the foreign observer should distinguish between this narrower, older official Britain and the greater newer Britain that struggles to free itself from the entanglement of a system outgrown.  There are many Englishmen who would like to say to the French and Irish and the Italians and India, who indeed feel every week now a more urgent need of saying, “Have patience with us.”  The Riddle of the British is very largely solved if you will think of a great modern liberal nation seeking to slough an exceedingly tough and tight skin....

Nothing is more illuminating and self-educational than to explain one’s home politics to an intelligent foreigner enquirer; it strips off all the secondary considerations, the allusiveness, the merely tactical considerations, the allusiveness, the merely tactical considerations.  One sees the forest not as a confusion of trees but as something with a definite shape and place.  I was asked in Italy and in France, “Where does Lord Northcliffe come into the British system—­or Lloyd George?  Who is Mr. Redmond?  Why is Lloyd George a Minister, and why does not Mr. Redmond take office?  Isn’t there something called an ordnance department, and why is there a separate ministry of munitions?  Can Mr. Lloyd George remove an incapable general?...”

I found it M. Joseph Reinach particularly penetrating and persistent.  It is an amusing but rather difficult exercise to recall what I tried to convey to him by way of a theory of Britain.  He is by no means an uncritical listener.  I explained that there is an “inner Britain,” official Britain, which is Anglican or official Presbyterian, which at the outside in the whole world cannot claim to speak for twenty million Anglican or Presbyterian communicants, which monopolises official positions, administration and honours in the entire British empire, dominates the court, and, typically, is spurred and red-tabbed. (It was just at this time that the spurs were most on my nerves.)

This inner Britain, I went on to explain, holds tenaciously to its positions of advantage, from which it is difficult to dislodge it without upsetting the whole empire, and it insists upon treating the rest of the four hundred millions who constitute that empire as outsiders, foreigners, subject races and suspected persons.

“To you,” I said, “it bears itself with an appearance of faintly hostile, faintly contemptuous apathy.  It is still so entirely insular that it shudders at the thought of the Channel Tunnel.  This is the Britain which irritates and puzzles you so intensely—­that you are quite unable to conceal these feelings from me.  Unhappily it is the Britain you see most of.  Well, outside this official Britain is ’Greater Britain’—­the real Britain with which you have to reckon in the future.” (From this point a faint flavour of mysticism crept into my dissertation.  I found myself talking with something in my voice curiously