From the day he went into the army till now he has been learning to take many things less seriously than he did. First what Burke calls the pomps and plausibilities of the world. He has tumbled many kings into the dust and proved the strongest emperor assailable. I remember a little private, who seemed to know Dickens by heart, applying to William the Second in 1915 the words used by the Game Chicken about Mr. Dombey--"as stiff a cove as ever he see, but within the resources of science to double him up with one blow in the waistcoat." This he proved, too, he and his like, casting down the proud from their seats with little help from all that was highly placed and reverently regarded in his own country. Our ruling class had, on the whole, failed, and had to be pulled through by him and the French and Americans; that feeling, in one form or another, is clear in the common man's mind. He may not know in detail the record of French as commander-in-chief, nor the exact state of the Admiralty which let the _Goeben_ and the _Breslau_ go free, nor the inner side of the diplomacy which added Turkey, and even Bulgaria, to our enemies, nor yet the well-born underworld of war-time luxury, disloyalty, and intrigue which notorious memoirs have since revealed. But some horse instinct or some pricking in his thumbs told him correctly that in every public service manned mainly by our upper classes the war-time achievement was relatively low. There is very little natural inclination to class jealousy among plain Englishmen. Equalitarian theory does not interest them much. Their general relish for a gamble makes them rather like a lucky-bag or bran-tub society in which anyone may pick up, with luck, a huge unearned prize. By cheerfully helping to keep up the big gaming-hell, by giving Barnatos and Joels pretty full value for their win, the pre-war governing class gained a kind of strength which a prouder and more fastidious aristocracy would have forgone. It stands in little physical danger now. But it lives, since the war, in a kind of contempt. The one good word that the average private had for bestowal among his unseen "betters" during the latter years of the war was for the King. "_He_ did give up his beer" was said a thousand times by men whom that symbolic act of willing comradeship with the dry throat on the march and the war-pinched household at home had touched and astonished.