"Not much, I admit, except in its serene ruthlessness. An English officer compels a Latin verb to fit in with his notion of what a Latin verb ought to do just in the same way as he expects a Spaniard to regard with pleasure his occupation of Gibraltar: any protest by a grammarian or an idealistic politician would strike him as impertinent. Harry Vereker's voice is a still more ineradicable manifestation of the spirit. Listen! He is asking the waiter in Serbian for salt, but he does so in a way that reminds one of mankind's concession to animals in using forms of communication that the latter can understand. It is not to be supposed that the dog invented patting: Harry's Serbian is his way of patting the waiter: it is his language, not the waiter's. Personally I can't help confessing that I admire this attitude to the world, and I only wish that it could be eternally preserved. The great historical tragedy of this war--I'm putting on one side for the moment the countless personal tragedies that are included in it, and trying to regard the war as Mr. Buckle regarded civilization--the great historical tragedy will be the Englishman's loss of his personality. When we look back at the historical tragedy of the fall of the Roman Empire, we think less of the _civis Romanus sum_ than of the monuments of architecture, law, political craft, and the rest that remain imperishably part of human progress. In the same way a thousand years hence I assume that the British Empire will be considered to have played a part only second to the Roman Empire in the manifest results of its domination. But what has been lost and what will be lost is the individual Roman's attitude and the individual Englishman's. Not all the remains of the Roman Empire have been enough really to preserve for us the indefinable flavor of being a Roman, and with much more material at his disposal I defy the perfect cosmopolitan of mixed Aryan, Mongol, and Semitic blood to realize a thousand years from now Harry Vereker's tone of voice in asking that waiter for the salt. No, no, the cosmopolitan of the future will turn aside from the records of the past and in Esperanto murmur sadly to himself that something is missing from his appreciation. Perhaps I can illustrate my meaning better if I compare the Athenians with the French. I feel that the art of both enduring through time to come will be enough. I have no regret for the personal attitude of the Athenian, and in the same way I don't feel that the cosmopolitan of a thousand years hence will lose anything by not meeting the Frenchman of to-day. It is Athens and France rather than the Athenian or the Frenchman of which the world is enamoured. How often have I heard a foreigner say: 'The politics of England do not please me: I find it a brigand policy, but the individual Englishman is always a gentleman.' An individual Englishman like Byron is worth more to England than twenty