Yet something does stray out of him. Look into his nice, bright, apparently-smiling English eyes. They are not smiling. And look again at his nice fresh English face, that seems so pleased with life. It also is not smiling, any more than Mr Lloyd George is really smiling. The eyes are not really at ease, and the nice, fresh face is not at ease either. At the centre of the eyes, where the smile twinkles, there is fear. Even at the middle of this amiable and all-tolerant English complacency, there is fear. And the smile-wrinkles on the fresh, pleased face, they give odd quivers, and look like spite wrinkles. There strays out of him, in spite of all his self-constraining, the faint effluence of fear, and the sense of impotence, and a quiver of spite, of subdued malice. Underneath the soft civilisedness of him, fear, impotence, and malice.

Whose heart within him ne’er hath burned

As home his wandering steps he turned

From travelling in a foreign land.

That’s how one finds the Englishman at home. And then one understands the bitterness of Englishmen abroad in the world, especially Englishmen in responsible positions.

There is no denying this: that since the war, England’s prestige has declined terribly, all over the world. Ah, says the Englishman, that’s because America has the dollars—And there you hear the voice of England’s own downfall.

England’s prestige wasn’t based on money. It was based on the imagination of men. England was supposed to be proud, and at the same time, free. Proud in her freedom, and free, to a certain extent generous, truly generous, in her pride.

This was the England that led the world. Myself, I think this was a true conception of England, at her best. This was how the other nations accepted her: at her best. And the individual Englishman got his certain honour, in the world, on the strength of it.

Now· Now he still receives the remnants of honour, but mockingly, as poor Russian counts receive a little mocking distinction, now that they have to sell newspapers. The real English pride has gone, and“superiority” takes its place: a really imbecile superiority, which the world laughs at.

As far as the wide world is concerned, England is anything but superior. She is just humiliated. From day to day she makes a more humiliating spectacle of herself in the eyes of the world. Weak, vacillating, without purpose or policy, without even the last vestige of pride, she continues to apologise and deprecate on the platform of the world.