They are the children’s children of those rather crude exponents of complacency and pride. They reveal no ostentatious complacency and pride. Their attitude is rather one of acceptance. It is not that they thank God that they are not as other men are. It is that they can imagine no conceivable readjustment of the universe which could make other men as themselves; or themselves different They are enterprising, but they shun adventure. They are kind, with no real possibility of sympathy. Enormous shut doors separate them from the real world: and they bend the world to their desires. “Doubts don’t help you,” says one of Mr. Galsworthy’s characters. “How can you get any good from doubts? The thing is to win victories.” “Victories?” is the reply. “I’d rather understand than conquer.” But the “Island Race” has preferred to conquer rather than to understand. And wisdom is justified of all her children. Once or twice, indeed, the critic is willing to suggest that perhaps the choice is not so mad a one after all. The ironical foreigner who prefers to resist, beg, cringe, and criticise, presents a figure not wholly heroic. He has fallen back on facts. He has sucked the salt and rind of life. He has deliberately contracted himself out of the universe of make-believe which he sees encompassing the people amongst whom his lot is cast. He enjoys his weakness and his laughter: the machine moves on; doing the work of the world. And these people, as he sees them--with their blindness to real issues, their carefully tended gardens, and the gates so severely padlocked which guard the pathways to waste spaces outside--may perhaps after all have learned the lesson of compromise in a world of frantic possibilities. The garden must be cultivated: cultivated, even if the sun which so pleasantly encourages its flowers to pass into kindly fruit is in reality a furnace of incredible fury; and the earth, of which this garden is a tiny segment, running along an illimitable inane towards no intelligible goal. “Spirit ruins you,” declares the little foreign barber, condemned always to shave paupers in the cellars of a Rowton lodging-house. “In this world what you want is to have no spirit.” The _drôle_ Irish actor dies drunk in squalor, all because he has something in him “which will not accept things as they are, believing always that they should be better.” “When he was no longer capable of active revolution he made it by getting drunk. At the last this was his only way of protesting against society.” And occasionally, from the heart of the mechanical routine, there comes evidence that understanding is there--that understanding is possible: that not grossness or obtuseness or selfishness, as in the first hasty verdict, but the deliberate determination _not_ to face the realities is the real motive power which keeps the system from falling into decay. For if the realities be faced, the bottom falls out of the world; and man,