Mr. H. Wickham Steed [Jan. 30, 



On returning to England after an absence of more than twenty- 

 one years, spent chiefly among the highly-organized States of the 

 Continent, I have been struck by nothing so much as by the ignorance, 

 insularity and sleepy carelessness of the British nation. It is true 

 that we are not, and never have been, a supremely intellectual people. 

 We rarely apprehend changes in national or international conditions 

 until the effects of those changes force themselves upon our notice 

 by affecting our physical comforts or emptying our pockets. Then 

 we indulge in the hysterical luxury of a "scare," put forward 

 amateurish theories to explain what has happened, essay some em- 

 pirical remedy — and go to sleep again. True, our slumber is not 

 tranquil. It is broken by uneasy memories of past " scares," of 

 shrieks of "Wolf!" when no wolf appeared. The public to-day 

 seems hardly to believe in the survival of " wolves," and professors 

 of political zoology are ever ready with the soporific assurance that 

 predatory animals are extinct or are, at worst, chained up with inter- 

 national chains of gold. But neither recurrent panic, nor recurrent 

 somnolence can do duty for a positive, conscious purpose. At the 

 present moment our nation seems to have no positive purpose, no 

 ideal. It is difficult to conceive a single issue that would unite all 

 classes of the community as one man in timely and set resolve to see 

 its purpose reaUzed. 



Whence proceeds this politico-moral disintegration ? I cannot 

 presume to analyse all its causes, but some symptoms strike me. 

 Instruction, as distinct from education, is to-day more wide-spread 

 than ever before. Parallel with the spread of instruction, and, to 

 some extent, as a result of it, runs a progressive loss of faith in the 

 older forms of belief, be the belief religious, social, economic or 

 moral. The word " interest " is acquiring remarkable prominence. 

 " Interest " is supposed to lie at the root of, and to provide a sufficient 

 justification for, all things. The conduct of a private citizen, of a 

 statesman, a party or a Government is judged in the light of his or 

 its supposed " interest," by which the balance of immediately realiz- 

 able advantage is usually meant. In diplomacy — that is to say, in the 

 conduct of foreign affairs — a " policy of interests " has largely re- 

 placed what, in some countries at least, was formerly a policy of ideals. 

 This development is, in part, an off-shoot of a mistaken interpretation 

 of the German word RealpoJitik, which is regarded as a synonym for 

 Bismarckianism. Bismarck was a great though not a vague idealist, 

 but he was, on occasion, unscrupulous to the point of criminality. 

 In his own mind he probably thought that the greater good to be 

 attained would outweigh the lesser evil to be done in attaining it. 

 But his example has given rise to a school of politicians and 

 diplomatists w^ho reason thus : Bismarck was a great man; he was 

 unscrupulous ; therefore the unscrupulous are great. This fallacy^ 

 is one of the parents of the mistaken conception of Realpolitik. 

 The modern "aristocratic" doctrine of "supermen" springs from. 



