The practice of
frightfulness has not worked very well in this war. It has steeled the
heart of Germany's enemies. It has produced in her victims a temper of
hate that will outlive this generation, and will make the small peoples
whom she has kicked and trampled on impossible subjects of the German
Empire. Worst of all it has suggested to onlookers that the people who
have so plenary a belief in frightfulness are not themselves strangers
to fear. There is an old English proverb, hackneyed and stale three
hundred years ago, but now freshened again by disuse, that the goodwife
would never have looked for her daughter in the oven unless she had been
there herself.
How shall I describe the English temper, which the Germans, high and
low, learned and ignorant, have so profoundly mistaken? You can get no
description of it from the Englishman pure and simple; he has no theory
of himself, and it bores him to hear himself described. Yet it is this
temper which has given England her great place in the world and which
has cemented the British Empire. It is to be found not in England alone,
but wherever there is a strain of English blood or an acceptance of
English institutions.
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