Some of the chief ingredients in the new temper are a more vigilant scepticism; a new impatience of strident enunciations of vague, venerable, political principles; a rough instinctive application of something like the new philosophy of pragmatism to all questions; and an elated sense of the speed and completeness with which institutions and powers apparently founded on rock can be scoured away. Great masses of men have become more freely critical of the claims of institutions and political creeds and parties which they used to accept without much scrutiny. It is not a temper that need be regarded with terror or reprobation. In itself it is neither good nor bad. It is the raw material of either good or evil, accordingly as it is guided--of barren destruction or of bold repair and improvement. But it is formidable. For men who have seen cities pounded to rubble, men who with little aid or guidance from their own rulers have chased emperors from their thrones, are pretty fully disengaged, at last, from the Englishman's old sense of immutable fixity in institutions which he may find irksome or worthless. "There's comfort yet. They are assailable." If the Holy Roman Empire has been knocked into smithereens, what public nuisance need remain? CHAPTER VII "CAN'T BELIEVE A WORD" I If you cannot hit or kick during a fight, at any rate you can spit. But, to be happy in this arm of the service, you have to feel sure that the adversary is signally fit to be spat upon. Hence, on each side in every war, the civilian will-to-believe that the other side are a set of ogres, every man of them. What a capital fiend the Boer, the man like Botha or Smuts, was made out to be during the last Boer War! He abused the white flag, he sawed a woman in two, he advanced behind screens of niggers; O, he was a great fellow! In 1870 French civilians laid freely to their souls the flattering unction that the Prussians murdered their prisoners. Strong in what was at bottom the same joyous faith, German civilians told you that French officers usually broke their parole. A few choice spirits will even carry this fond observance into the milder climate of sport. A boy of this kidney, while looking on at a vital house match, will give his mind ease by telling a friend what "a lot of stinkers" the other house are. A follower of Cambridge cricket, a man of fifty, in whom you might expect the choler of youth to have cooled, has been found musing darkly over a large photograph of an Oxford eleven. They seemed to me, as is the way of these heroes, to lack nothing of outward charm except the light of intellect in the eye. But "Look at them!" he observed with conviction. "The hangdog expressions! The narrow, ill-set Mongol eyes! The thin, cruel lips! Prejudice apart, would you like to meet that gang in a quiet place on a dark night?" From