ENGLAND AND THE WAR being SUNDRY ADDRESSES delivered during the war and now first collected by WALTER RALEIGH OXFORD 1918 CONTENTS PREFACE MIGHT IS RIGHT First published as one of the Oxford Pamphlets, October 1914. THE WAR OF IDEAS An Address to the Royal Colonial Institute, December 12, 1916. THE FAITH OF ENGLAND An Address to the Union Society of University College, London, March 22, 1917. SOME GAINS OF THE WAR An Address to the Royal Colonial Institute, February 13, 1918. THE WAR AND THE PRESS A Paper read to the Essay Society, Eton College, March 14, 1918. SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND The Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy, delivered July 4, 1918. PREFACE This book was not planned, but grew out of the troubles of the time. When, on one occasion or another, I was invited to lecture, I did not find, with Milton's Satan, that the mind is its own place; I could speak only of what I was thinking of, and my mind was fixed on the War. I am unacquainted with military science, so my treatment of the War was limited to an estimate of the characters of the antagonists. The character of Germany and the Germans is a riddle. I have seen no convincing solution of it by any Englishman, and hardly any confident attempt at a solution which did not speak the uncontrolled language of passion. There is the same difficulty with the lower animals; our description of them tends to be a description of nothing but our own loves and hates. Who has ever fathomed the mind of a rhinoceros; or has remembered, while he faces the beast, that a good rhinoceros is a pleasant member of the community in which his life is passed? We see only the folded hide, the horn, and the angry little eye. We know that he is strong and cunning, and that his desires and instincts are inconsistent with our welfare. Yet a rhinoceros is a simpler creature than a German, and does not trouble our thought by conforming, on occasion, to civilized standards and humane conditions.