When the
grave-digger remarks that it is no great matter if Hamlet do not recover
his wits in England, because there the men are as mad as he, the satire
has a sympathetic ring in it. Shakespeare did not wish to see the mad
English altered. Nor are they likely to alter; our fears and our hopes
are vain. We entered on the greatest of our wars with an army no bigger,
so we are told, than the Bulgarian army. Since that time we have
regimented and organized our people, not without success; and our
soothsayers are now directing our attention to the danger that after the
war we shall be kept in uniform and shall become tame creatures, losing
our independence and our spirit of enterprise. There is nothing that
soothsayers will not predict when they are gravelled for lack of matter,
but this is the stupidest of all their efforts. The national character
is not so flimsy a thing; it has gone through good and evil fortune for
hundreds of years without turning a hair. You can make a soldier, and a
good soldier, of a humorist; but you cannot militarize him. He remains a
free thinker.
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