A country is such a huge conglomeration of types and qualities; such a seething mass of energies! It seems sometimes as impossible to thread one’s way to the heart of that maze as to fix the pattern of a thousand gnats dancing in a sunlit lane! One turns eyes here, there, follows this movement and that, thinks one has the clue, falls back gaping. Is there any essence which sets the British soul apart, as an oak is set apart from beech or lime tree? Can there, indeed, be any single essence in a land where Iberian and Celt, Saxon and Norseman, still quarrel in the blood? I think there is, and will hazard an attempt to throw on the screen some faint shadow of the elusive thing. Take certain salient British characteristics: Our peculiar national under-emphasis and stolidity; our want of imagination; that desire to have things both ways—which is generally called our “hypocrisy”; our turn of ironic humour; our bulldog grip; our lack of _joie de vivre_; our snobbishness—dying, but dying very hard; our perpetual desire for the moral in action or art; our regard for “good form”; our slow dumb idealism, hand in hand with our profound distrust of ideas; our propensity for grumbling under prosperity, and our cheeriness under hardship; our passion for games, and our creed of “playing the game”; our love of individual liberty—even our perversity and crankiness. . . . Take them all, and consider whether there is not some fundamental underlying instinct. I believe that the mainspring of the British soul, concealed by a layer of mental laziness from superficial scrutiny, is nothing but an inveterate instinct for competition. The Briton is the most competitive creature on the face of the earth—save possibly the American of British descent. True—we would, as they phrase it on the turf, make a race with a donkey, for our climate has certainly sluggarded the circulation of our blood. None the less, we have a perpetual secret itch for competition, so bone deep that most of us do not even know of it. All through our lives we are playing a match. When the Briton is not secretly pitting himself against somebody or something, he can hardly be said to be alive. I do not think, speaking racially, that he cares so much for what he gets by the game as for the game itself and victory in it. He sets little store by the perfection of his handiwork so long as it beats the handiwork of others; or—and this is the saving grace—so long as in the accomplishment he has defeated the slackness or cowardice in his own nature—won the match within himself. Let us turn them over one by one, those salient British characteristics: Stolidity! Under-emphasis! It is surely nothing but contempt of fuss; and what is fuss but allowing too much importance to the task or person you are up against? The instinct of competition forbids that in the Briton; he is so competitive that he does not deign to let people see that he is stretching himself.