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become distasteful to the Englishman when they get to the 
point of endangering the stability of social order. England 
was the mother of many of the ideas which led to the French 
Revolution, but the spectacle of the French Revolution 
frightened Englishmen into a reaction which lasted thirty 
years. Once let free speech bode serious mutiny, and the 
Englishman would clap on the muzzle without hesitation. 
He is the despair of the systematiser, and is always dis- 
appointing the idealist. If he believes himself in the right 
that is enough for him. He knows perhaps that his motives 
are mixed ; the social order which he is determined to preserve 
may be far from being a model, but he has a keen sense for 
the complexity of things, and does not believe ideal solutions 
are possible ; they may promise great things, but his con- 
viction is that they would break down in practice. In guiding 
the course of the ship of State through the unseen dangers 
which beset it, the Englishman trusts rather to physical 
instinct than to the guidance of trimly formulated theory. 
He believes no single self-consistent theory could take all the 
necessary factors into account. 
No one can predict what will be the next call upon the 
national character. There is a persistent duality in our 
national life. Two nations have grown together and the 
result is toleration tempered by police. The foreigner says 
we are a muddled intellectual composite, incapable of lucid 
generalisation, and he generally ends up by charging us with 
hypocrisy. Can we deny that the English habit of seeing 
both sides leads us sometimes into the “ channel of no mean 
between Scylla and Charybdis ” ? At the bottom of all we 
are a practical people. 
As things are shaping themselves in the world at the present 
time it looks as though, under the new conditions set up by 
applied science, the key to national strength is to lie in the 
power of organisation, in subordinating the individual to the 
collective whole. A study of English character as revealed 
in history for many generations not does give much encourage- 
ment to the hope that England would long show herself obedient 
and plastic in any searching discipline of social organisation. 
Behind all present tendencies there lies the deeper and more 
permanent need for strength of individual character, for 
tenacity of individual principle, and for simplicity of individual 
life. The great task of England is to maintain, at some 
cost of temporary success, a form of social freedom which 
carries within it the best guarantee for the unexpected 
development of thought and action in the future. 
