Again, no living observer has ever seen England in adversity: beaten to the knees, to the ground. No one can foresee what spirit--either of resistance or acquiescence--latent in this kindly, lazy, good-natured people might be evoked by so elemental a challenge. England is often sharply contrasted with Ireland, and the Irish with the English people. What spirit would be manifest amongst the English people to-day if they had been subjugated by an alien conqueror, with their lands dispossessed, their religion penalised, their national ideals everywhere faced with opposition and disdain? Such an experience might have been stamped upon history if the Armada had reached these shores; it might have “staggered humanity” with unforgettable memories. Would an invaded England offer the resistance of an invaded Germany, or of an invaded Spain, in the Napoleonic Wars? How would we actually treat our “Communists” if they seized London after a time of national disaster and established a “Social” Republic? No one can tell what a man will do in such a shock as the Messina earthquake, or when the shells of the invader, without warning, crash through the ruins of his home. And no one can foresee what a nation will do in adversity which has never seen itself compelled to face the end of its customary world. Again, we know little or nothing to-day of the great multitude of the people who inhabit these islands. They produce no authors. They edit no newspapers. They find no vocal expression for their sentiments and desires. Their leaders are either chosen from another class, or, from the very fact of leadership, sharply distinguished from the members of their own. They are never articulate except in times of exceptional excitement; in depression, when trade is bad; in exuberance, when, as on the “Mafeking” nights, they suddenly appear from nowhere to take possession of the city. England, for the nation or foreign observer, is the tone and temper which the ideals and determinations of the middle class have stamped upon the vision of an astonished Europe. It is the middle class which stands for England in most modern analyses. It is the middle class which is losing its religion; which is slowly or suddenly discovering that it no longer believes in the existence of the God of its fathers, or a life beyond the grave. It is the middle class whose inexhaustible patience fills the observer with admiration and amazement as he beholds it waiting in the fog at a London terminus for three hours beyond the advertised time, and then raising a cheer, half joyful, half ironical, when the melancholy train at last emerges from the darkness. And it is the middle class which has preserved under all its security and prosperity that elemental unrest which this same observer has identified as an inheritance from an ancestry of criminals and adventurers: which drives it out from many a quiet vicarage and rose garden into a journey far beyond the skyline, to become the