"Among the notes we drew up, I say, on this question of neglected duty, were details as to the citizen's obligations regarding the defence of his home and native land, with special reference to the callous neglect of Lord Roberts's campaign of warning and exhortation. Now, Stairs, you know as well as I do, you wrote with your own hand the passage about the Englishman's sphere of duty being as much wider than his country as Greater Britain was wider than Great Britain. You know you did." "Oh, you can count me in, all right, Reynolds; you know I'm not one for half-measures." "Well, now, my friends, I believe I see daylight. By joining hands I really believe we are going to accomplish something for England." Crondall looked round the table at the faces of his friends. "We are all agreed, I know, that the present danger is the danger Kipling tried to warn us about years and years ago." "'Lest we forget!'" quoted Sir Herbert quietly. "Exactly. There are so many in England who have neither seen nor felt anything of the blow we have had." And here I told them something of what I had seen and heard in Dorset; how remote and unreal the whole thing was to folk there. "That's it, exactly," continued Crondall. "That's one difficulty which has just got to be overcome. Another is the danger that, among those who did see and feel something of it, here in London, and even in East Anglia, the habit of apathy in national matters, and the calls of business and pleasure may mean forgetting, indifference--the old fatal neglect. You see, we must remember that, crushing as the blow was, it did not actually reach so very many people. It did not force them to get up and fight for their lives. It was all over so soon. Directly they cried out, 'The Destroyers' answered with surrender, and so helped to strengthen the fatal delusion they had cherished so long, that everything is a matter of pounds, shillings, and pence." "'They'll never go for England, because England's got the dibs,'" quoted Forbes Thompson, with a nod of assent. "Yes, yes. 'Make alliances, and leave me to my business!' One knows it all so well. But, mind you, even to the blindest of them, the invasion has meant something." "And the income-tax will mean something to 'em, too," said Sir Morell Strachey. "Yes. But the English purse is deep, and the Englishman has long years of money-spinning freedom from discipline behind him. Still, here is this brutal fact of the invasion. Here we are actually condemned to nine years of life inside a circle of German encampments on English soil, with a hundred millions a year of tribute to pay for the right to live in our own England. Now my notion is that the lesson must not be lost. The teaching of the thing must be forced home. It must be burnt into these happy-go-lucky countrymen of ours--if Stairs and Reynolds are to achieve their end, or we ours."