One result of the war has not always been realised. The eighteenth century had been international; there was no Chauvinism or Jingoism anywhere till the French, fighting ostensibly under the banner of humanity, had kindled the fire of patriotism in Spain, in Germany, and even in Russia. England had always had a strong national self-consciousness; and after the war the bonds of sympathy with France were not at once renewed, so that our country, during the early part of Victoria's reign, was more isolated from the main currents of European thought than ever before or since. Men of letters who lamented this isolation now turned for inspiration rather to Germany than to France. On the other hand, the war did not interrupt the intellectual life of the country to anything like the same extent as the recent Great War. At no period since the Elizabethans was there such an output of great poetry; and it does not seem to have occurred to any young lady of that time to ask Scott, Wordsworth or Jane Austen what they were doing during the war. Modern sociologists have drawn lurid pictures of the condition of the working class during the earlier part of the last century. It seems in truth to have been very bad. Byron in 1812 told the Lords: 'I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey, but never under the most despotic of infidel governments did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return in the very heart of a Christian country.' In 1831 a member of parliament said: 'An agricultural labourer and a pauper--the words are synonymous.' Those who want details can find them in the well-known controversial books by the Hammonds, which state the case against the governing class in an exhaustive manner. There was in fact too much ground for Disraeli's statement that England at that time consisted of two nations, the rich and the poor. The poor were still largely illiterate, and so inarticulate; and the comparative absence of the large half-educated class which now dominates all public discussion made the cultivated gentry a class apart. Their own standard of culture was higher than that of the leisured class to-day; but they took little interest in the lives of the poor, until they were forced to do so. We however who have witnessed the succession of economic crises which attend and follow a great war ought not to forget the appalling difficulties with which the government was confronted. In 1795 there was actual famine, which was met by the famous system of doles out of the rates, in augmentation of wages, a most mischievous bit of legislation, like the similar expedients of the last three years. It had the double effect of pauperising the rural labourer and of putting an artificial premium on large families--the children who were carted off in waggon-loads to feed the factories. It was repealed only when the ruined farmers were abandoning their land, and the glebe-owning clergy their livings.