60 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 



The young giant had certainly got out of long-clothes. He 

 had become the enfant terrible of the human household. It 

 was not and will not be easy for the world (especially for our 

 British cousins) to look upon us as grown up. The youngest 

 of nations, its people must also be youns* and to be treated 

 accordingly, was the syllogism as if libraries did not make 

 all nations equally old in all those respects, at least, where 

 age is an advantage and not a defect. Youth, no doubt, has 

 its good qualities, as people feel who are losing it ; but boy 

 ishness is another thing. We had been somewhat boyish as 

 a nation, a little loud, a little pushing, a little braggart. But 

 might it not partly have been because we felt that we had 

 certain claims to respect that were not admitted ? The war 

 which established our position as a vigorous nationality has 

 also sobered us. A nation, like a man, cannot look death in 

 the eye for four years, without some strange reflections, with 

 out arriving at some clearer consciousness of the stuff it is 

 made of, without some great moral change. Such a change, 

 or the beginning of it, no observant person can fail to see 

 here. Our thought and our politics, our bearing as a people, 

 are assuming a manlier tone. We have been compelled to 

 see what was weak in democracy as well as what was strong. 

 We have begun obscurely to recognise that things do not go 

 of themselves, and that popular government is not in itself a 

 panacea, is no better than any other form except as the 

 virtue and wisdom of the people make it so, and that when 

 men undertake to do their own kingship, they enter upon 

 the dangers and responsibilities as well as the privileges of 

 the function. Above all, it looks as if we were on the way to 

 be persuaded that no government can be carried on by de 

 clamation. It is noticeable also that facility of communica 

 tion has made the best English and French thought far more 

 directly operative here than ever before. Without being 

 Europeanised, our discussion of important questions in states 

 manship, political economy, in aesthetics, is taking a broader 

 scope and a higher tone. It had certainly been provincial, 

 one might almost say local, to a very unpleasant extent. 

 Perhaps our experience in soldiership has taught us to value 

 training more than we have been popularly wont. We may 

 possibly come to the conclusion, one of these days, that self- 

 made men may not be always equally skilful in the manu 

 facture of wisdom, may not be divinely commissioned to 



