THE ENGLISH PUBLIC SCHOOLS. THE ESSENTIAL DEMOCRACY OF THE GOVERNMENT. THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND THE PRESS (at present rather under a cloud). THE OLD-TIME FREEDOM FROM COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE. All these, the outcome of the quiet and stable home life of an island people, have helped to make the Englishman a deceptive personality to the outside eye. He has for centuries been licensed to grumble. There is no such confirmed grumbler――until he really has something to grumble at; and then, no one perhaps who grumbles less. An English soldier was sitting in a trench, in the act of lighting his pipe, when a shell burst close by, and lifted him bodily some yards away. He picked himself up, bruised and shaken, and went on lighting his pipe, with the words: “These French matches aren’t ’alf rotten.” Confirmed carper though the Englishman is at the condition of his country, no one perhaps is so profoundly convinced that it is the best in the world. A stranger might well think from his utterances that he was spoiled by the freedom of his life, unprepared to sacrifice anything for a land in such a condition. If that country be threatened, and with it his liberty, you find that his grumbles have meant less than nothing. You find, too, that behind the apparent slackness of every arrangement and every individual, are powers of adaptability to facts, elasticity, practical genius, a spirit of competition amounting almost to disease, and great determination. Before this war began, it was the fashion among a number of English to lament the decadence of their race. Such lamentations, which plentifully deceived the outside ear, were just English grumbles. All this democratic grumbling, and habit of “going as you please,” serve a deep purpose. Autocracy, censorship, compulsion destroy the salt in a nation’s blood, and elasticity in its fibre; they cut at the very mainsprings of a nation’s vitality. Only if reasonably free from control can a man really arrive at what is or is not national necessity and truly identify himself with a national ideal, by simple conviction from within. Two words of caution to strangers trying to form an estimate of the Englishman: He must not be judged from his Press, which, manned (with certain exceptions) by those who are not typically English, is too hectic to illustrate the true English spirit; nor can he be judged entirely from his literature. The Englishman is essentially inexpressive, unexpressed; and his literary men have been for the most part sports――Nature’s attempt to redress the balance. Further, he must not be judged by the evidence of his wealth. England may be the richest country in the world in proportion to its population, but not ten per cent of that population have any wealth to speak of, certainly not enough to have affected their hardihood; and, with few exceptions, those who have enough wealth are brought up to worship hardihood.