In their vices as well as their virtues the English preserve a distinguished moderation. They do not utterly shrink from jobbery, for example; they do from a job that is flagrant or gross. They give judgeships as prizes for party support, but not to the utterly briefless, the dullard who knows no more law than necessity. Building contractors, when in the course of their rise they become town councillors, do not give bribes right and left: their businesses thrive without that. An Irishman running a Tammany in the States cannot thus hold himself in: the humorous side of corruption charms him too much: he wants to let the grand farce of roguery rip for all it is worth. But the English private's pet dictum, "There's reason in everything," rules the jobber, the profiteer, the shirker and placeman of Albion as firmly as it controls the imagination of her Wordsworths and the political idealism of her Cromwells and Pitts. Like her native cockroaches and bugs, whose moderate stature excites the admiration and envy of human dwellers among the corresponding fauna of the tropics, the caterpillars of her commonwealth preserve the golden mean; few, indeed, are flamboyants or megalomaniacs. So, when the war with its great opportunities came we were but temperately robbed by our own birds of prey. Makers of munitions made mighty fortunes out of our peril. Still, every British soldier did have a rifle, at any rate when he went to the front. I have watched a twelve-inch gun fire, in action, fifteen of its great bales or barrels of high explosives, fifteen running, and only three of the fifteen costly packages failed to explode duly on its arrival beyond. Vendors of soldiers' clothes and boots acquired from us the wealth which dazzles us all in these days of our own poverty. They knew how to charge: they made hay with a will while the blessed suns of 1914-18 were high in the heavens. Still, nearly all the tunics made in that day of temptation did hold together; none of the boots, so far as I knew or heard tell, was made of brown paper. "He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent." Still, there is reason in everything. "Meden agan," as the Greeks said--temperance in all things, even in robbery, even in patriotism and personal honour. Our profiteers did not bid Satan get him behind them; but they did ask him to stand a little to one side.