That they would not rest content with these advantages, this political and commercial equality, that they would want to organize secret treachery, to spy out our weaknesses and hide bombs in their bedrooms, that--to the simple Briton of a few weeks ago--would have seemed impossible. He now knows what primitive passions may lurk behind a plausible commercialism secretly disappointed in its immoderate greed. It is in the alliance of despotic militarism with bureaucratic intellectual sophistry that has lain a new peril for the world, and one yet to be fully realized by the German people, when many of the hasty and speculative structures of her self-conscious and academic Protectionism are discovered to be as unsound as the quasi-religious aphorisms of the Kaiser. In spite of these confident assurances it may be the fate of that arrogant leader to find himself at war with “things,” stony facts, economic laws that crush the transgressor, as well as with an indignant world. Meanwhile--our armies have fought bravely and held their own in the greatest battle, the most ferocious conflict the world ever dreamed of. Our unconquered fleet, after the tradition of four centuries, is still “looking for the enemy.” All around us, as we write, is evidence that this nation is bracing herself for a new and stupendous effort of courage, perhaps of imaginative strategy, and even _Weltpolitik_ which will in startling fashion bring the forces of half the world to meet and crush a world-menacing peril, and place our England, the mistress of the seas, on a pinnacle where she will be justified of all her patriotic children, counsellors, critics and heroes alike. G. H. POWELL. FOOTNOTE: [A] Contributed by Genl. Sir Geo. T. Chesney (1830-1895) to _Blackwood’s Magazine_ (May, 1871). It created a great sensation and appeared in pamphlet form the same year. THE BATTLE OF DORKING You ask me to tell you, my grandchildren, something about my own share in the great events that happened fifty years ago. ’Tis sad work turning back to that bitter page in our history, but you may perhaps take profit in your new homes from the lesson it teaches. For us in England it came too late. And yet we had plenty of warnings, if we had only made use of them. The danger did not come on us unawares. It burst on us suddenly, ’tis true; but its coming was foreshadowed plainly enough to open our eyes, if we had not been wilfully blind. We English have only ourselves to blame for the humiliation which has been brought on the land. Venerable old age! Dishonourable old age, I say, when it follows a manhood dishonoured as ours has been. I declare, even now, though fifty years have passed, I can hardly look a young man in the face when I think I am one of those in whose youth happened this degradation of Old England--one of those who betrayed the trust handed down to us unstained by our forefathers.