"You may say," he went on (but I had said nothing of the kind. I had, as a matter of fact, hardly opened my mouth: he had given me no chance). "You may say," he went on, "that we are not more cynical now than we were in the days of the Regency. True, perhaps. But that is what makes it so serious. Because since the Regency we have had eighty years or so of seriousness and steady improvement--the Victorian Era, with its fine political and intellectual and religious activity, its Reform Bill, its Tractarian movement, its Dickens and Carlyle, its Browning and Ruskin, its awakening to new ideas. To-day we are steadily going back on all that. We believe only in pleasure and success: our one ideal is wealth." "Well," I said, for I was getting a little tired, and perhaps I was a little piqued too at the turn the "interview" had taken, "and what is the remedy for all this evil?" "War," he said. "Nothing more or less. A bloody war--not a punitive expedition or 'a sort of a war'" (he quoted these words with white fury). "That might get us right again." "At great cost," I said. "A surgical operation," he replied, "if the only means of saving life, cannot be called expensive." "But supposing we went under?" "If we did, it would be better so. Then we should begin again in a new spirit. Loss would be gain." "A very dreadful form of cure," I said. "True. But not more dreadful than the decay that comes from complacency. A nation fighting for its life makes for me a finer spectacle than a nation overeating at a banquet. "The most sacred and valuable treasure that the English have lost," he went on more gravely, "is the capacity for self-denial. The old figure of John Bull was never to my mind admirable. He not only looked too secure in his own wealth and rectitude but too apoplectic. But he was a better national symbol for the English than the new John Bull that one would have to draw now were one a satirical artist with critical vision--a John Bull more like a Maida Vale Jew. John Bull grows materialistic and sensual. An anxious war would mend that. Set him fighting for very existence, and you will bring out his good qualities again." "I don't agree with you," I said, "about war. Its horrors are too horrible. What I think we want is a saint." "You won't get one," said Mr. Dabney, "and besides, every saint has a bee in his halo." "I don't know that that matters," said I. "It is the bees that do the work. The bee is often the most original part of the man's brain, just as the skeleton is often the only really living thing in the family's cupboard. Most people are dead. "The saint," I went on, "that England needs is a saint of extraordinary personal magnetism--a saint (as I see it dimly) whom our young men and women will follow in enthusiastic ecstasy; a saint----"