“By all means, Mr Sinclair, and those who have watched carefully through the crevice must have seen that, for a long time, we have been going the contrary way of the tide.” “I do not know how it is to end—no regiments have been ordered out since our catastrophe.” This was Lord Mowbray again, who was not fond of ethics and preferred coming back to facts. “The passing of regiments through the town would turn out a failure in our present condition,” retorted Danford. “No windows would be thrown open, no hearty cheers would rejoice the hearts of departing warriors; that excitement is over for ever—it was even on the wane before we stood as we are now. I often wonder why Society did not raise a regiment of Duchesses and Peeresses? That would have fetched the masses, and perhaps might have provoked a general surrendering of the enemy to an Amazon battalion; for certainly the novelty of the enterprise, and the incontestable beauty of the Peeresses’ physique, would do a great deal towards enlivening the old rotten game of warfare. But they missed the opportunity of putting new wine into old bottles, and now it is too late. After all, patriotism is only a question of coloured bunting: tear down the flags, and nationality will die a natural death.” “What a _sans patrie_ you are, Mr Danford,” contemptuously said Lord Mowbray, whose conception of Fatherland reduced itself to a season in London, a summer in Switzerland, and a winter on the Riviera. “Danford is an unconscious prophet,” remarked Lionel, “for it is clear to whoever observes minutely the evolution of nationalities that we are all unwittingly working at the creation of a vast humanity. The more man will know of man—and it is impossible he should do otherwise, when you consider the map of the world and view the huge cobweb of railways which unite countries to one another—the more, I repeat, man will know of man, the fainter will become frontiers which have for so long separated human beings and turned them into enemies. The first time that men of different nationalities met and shook hands in a universal Exhibition, that day a muffled knell was heard in the far distance announcing the slow agony of nationalities. But it is again a question of the thick ice over the current. Progress in every branch is the name for which we labour and suffer; but conquest is the real aim of all our strenuous efforts. We have too long minimised the power of the current, and one day, whether we like it or not, we shall have to go where it leads us.”