All I want to say now is that as I strolled with Larry Strangways along that sunny walk, and as he ran on about Brokenshires and Graingers, I got my first bit of insight into the immense American romance which the nineteenth century unfolded. I saw it was romance, gigantic, race-wide. For the first time in my life I realized that there were other tales to make men proud besides the story of the British Empire. I could see that Larry Strangways was proud--proud and anxious. I had never seen this side of him before. Pride was in the way in which he held his fine young head; there was anxiety in his tone, and now and then in the flash of his eye, in spite of his efforts not to be too serious. It was about the country that he talked--its growth, its vastness. Even as recently as when he was a boy it was still a manageable thing, with a population reckoned at no more than seventy or eighty millions. It had been homogeneous in spirit if not in blood, and those who had come from other lands, and been welcomed and adopted, accepted their new situation with some gratitude. Patriotism was still a word with a meaning, and if it now and then became spread-eagleism it was only as the waves when thrown too far inland become froth. The wave was the thing and it hadn't ebbed. "And do you think it has ebbed now?" I asked. He didn't answer this question directly. "We're becoming colossal. We shall soon count our people by the hundred million and more. Of these relatively few will have got our ideals. Some will reject them. There are mutterings already of other standards to which we must be taught to conform. Some of our own best people of pure Anglo-Saxon descent are losing heart and renouncing and denouncing the democratic tradition, though they've nothing to put in its place. And we're growing so huge--with a hugeness that threatens to make us lethargic." I tried to be encouraging. "You seem to me anything but that." "National lethargy can easily exist side by side with individual energy. Take China, for instance. There are few peoples in the world more individually diligent than the Chinese; and yet when it comes to national stirring it's a country as difficult to move as an unwieldy overfed giant. It's flabby and nerveless and inert. It's spread half over Asia, and it has the largest and most industrious population in the world; and yet it's a congeries of inner weaknesses, and a prey to any one who chooses to attack it." "And you think this country is on the way to being the China of the west?" "I don't say on the way. There's danger of it. In proportion as we too become unwieldy and overfed, the circulation of that national impulse which is like blood grows slower. The elephant is a heavily moving beast in comparison with the lion." "But it's the more intelligent," I argued, still with a disposition to be encouraging. "Intelligence won't save it when the lion leaps on its back." "Then what will?" "That's what we want to find out."