Want of imagination! That is partly the mental laziness, no doubt, engendered by our thick climate; but much of it, I think, is only the subconscious refusal by our competitive natures to see too quickly and clearly what we have before us, lest we be discouraged. A great help—to have muddled through most of the battle before you are aware of the size and length of it! Our rather grim turn of humour! Is it not generally a jest at the expense of a fate which thought it could set us down? Our hypocrisy! One would not admit a physical defeat, but clench the teeth and have at it again; then, how admit moral defeat? Impossible! Face must be saved—instinctively again, unconsciously—for the last thing we plead guilty to is our “hypocrisy.” The bulldog grip—speaks for itself. Our lack of _joie de vivre_! We are playing a match—we have no chance or time to relax, to lie on our backs and let the sunlight warm our faces. We have not time to give ourselves up to life; there is so much to beat—we are playing a match. Our veneration for rank of every kind! Snobbishness! This is surely nothing but our recognition of the value of attainment; acknowledgment of victories won, if not in the present, in the past; tacit confession that we, too, want to win such victories. Our craving for a moral! Well, what is a moral, if not the triumph of what we call “good” over what we call “evil”? We crave that triumph—not only in action, but also, I fear, in art. Art must not merely excite within us impersonal emotion; it must be useful to us in our match with life—a pity! Our worship of “good form” is partly dread of that ridicule which would be a proof of our having fallen short, and partly recognition by a people who have long lived an exceptionally stable social life, that this competitive instinct of ours, unchecked by rules, becomes a nuisance to ourselves and others. In the same way, “playing the game” is but the necessary check on our passion for a match. Our inveterate dumb idealism is of course a primary constituent element in the fighting nature; and our distrust of ideas a natural lazy dread of being pushed on too fast by that idealism. Our grumbling habits, when there is little or nothing to grumble at, show, I think, that in slackness and prosperity we are really out of our element; while our ironic cheerfulness under hardship—the cry “Are we down-hearted? No-o!” proves that times of stress suit our competitive temperament. Our love of individual liberty! A man, the joy of whose life is winning an event over himself or others, naturally desires the utmost latitude for these perpetual contests. And so the Briton becomes “a crank” more often than members of any other race.