May 29, 1915 
LAND AND WATER 
THE SPIRIT OF THE FUTURE 
GIVE the English people a chance, and they can 
adapt themselves to anything, within reason. 
And the war appeals to them, pace the pacifists, 
as being eminently within reason. As a scientific 
writer of some eminence has lately said, they 
" seem rather to like war with Germany." Pulled and 
pushed by the poUticians and the papers, they have yielded 
remarkably Uttle to the alternate impulses of blind optimism 
and pessimism that they have been told should be the patriot's 
part ; that they have kept on so even a keel has been in spite 
of the majority of their instructors. For the most part they 
leave the speech-makers and the leader-writers severely alone, 
and devote themselves to an attempt to dig out ail the meaning 
that may lie embedded in the calm, terse language of com- 
muniques from the front. The efforts of politicians or news- 
paper proprietors to attract or deflect their attention 
seem comically puny ; you figure a giant who is the 
People, studiously poring over the latest news, while 
on either side diminutive orators and wire-pullers are 
shouting admonitions to him through megaphones. It 
would make a subject for the satirical genius of Mr. Will 
Dyson. 
Perhaps we expected too much in the way of light 
and leading from those who seek to control the state of 
mind of the nation. We get a fallacious notion into our 
heads — magazine stories have done much to foster it^of 
a strong, silent man who sits, spider-like, in the centre 
of a vast web of telegraph and telephone wires, and whose 
finger is on every pulse in the country. This is true enough 
of financiers, in so far as their doings are purely (if the adverb 
is appropriate) concerned with money ; but these go wrong 
directly they touch human issues. Equally, it is true enough of 
a commander-in-chief at the front (in so far as his wires remain 
intact) to the extent to which purely military matters are 
concerned. But it is far from true of Government depart- 
ments and newspaper offices, except in so far as their pro- 
ceedings are a matter of simple mathematics. And even then 
they have been known to make mistakes in adding up the 
figures. A newspaper is often convinc.d that "a great 
wave of popular feeling " has arisen in the country by the 
receipt of a great flood of angry and incoherent letters — the 
work of some minority that has temporarily lost its head — 
and in any case is about as " popular " as the National Liberal 
Club. What it is that chiefly convinces a Government 
department that " the country is calling out " for this action 
or that, is a mystery into which it is beyond the scope of this 
brief article to probe ; in any case it is, or one may hope that 
it will become, a peace time question. One could hardly in 
reason have expected that most of these walled-in office- 
dwellers would at once comprehend and direct the new stir- 
rings of the national spirit. 
What stands as the forefront of the people's spirit is 
the people's army ; behind this stretch further ranks, from 
the much focussed munition workers to the wives and mothers 
whose brave patience is not the least factor of national 
stability. Few of the talkers who run up and down the ranks 
have much part or lot in the great movement that has assured 
our victory. The portrait which, of those at home, the people 
most often recall to their mind's eye is not of any gesticulating 
orator, but of the quiet figure of Lord Kitchener. He says 
very little, but they know that he " thinks a thundering 
lot," and they feel that his thoughts are their thoughts. 
Mr. Asquith, though, is in another case from the would-be 
directors of public thought. He has been big enough in 
spirit to see the national spirit as something far bigger. 
Humbly constituting himself the mouthpiece of the people, 
he has let the national inspiration blow through him to fine 
purpose, and has given us perhaps the only utterance from 
high places that is worthy to go down in history. Also, a 
negative but a notable achievement, he has refrained with 
characteristic dignity from the movement to bullyrag the 
people about " realising the war." 
This remarkably stupid insult to the enormous majority 
of the people made one glad that they had no ear for the 
megaphones, being too busily employed in seeking out the 
rare grains of fact upon which their realisation supported 
its half-starved existence. It was a rehef when the movement 
turned again into a fitting internecine warfare between the office- 
dwellers, and the papers, finding that the people were out of 
range, were led by one or two more perspicacious among 
their number to renew their fire upon the real culprits, 
a few men who were magnifying their vocation into 
concealment for concealment's sake. This, at least, did 
soUd good. The problem of spreading enough news for 
reaUsation, and of spreading it in a form concrete enough to 
cause some stirring of the blood, whUe keeping the enemy 
effectually in the dark, was and is difficult enough, though the 
wisest should have it in hand. The people's reaUsation, 
hke the people's army, had perforce to come slowly. We 
shall prove to have done none the worse for that. An island 
nation with a powerful fleet can afford to deal even with the 
cataclysm of Europe by a gradual and organic process of 
growth. Germany knows well enough the meaning of our 
ascending curve of power and purpose. That is why the 
Hymn of Hate was written. 
An unspoken consciousness may be felt, now, to be at 
the back of many minds, that after the natural period of 
human gestation a new soul of our country has indeed come 
to the birth. It is a birth too gigantic to be known at once 
for what it is, too vast to be visible. And the more than 
Gargantuan infant is naturally inarticulate as yet. But his 
thunderous crowing is heard from the troop-trains, as he 
reaches out to strangle the serpents that menace his cradle, 
even as did the infant Hercules. In another mood, he can 
show an infantile destructiveness at times ; he must not be 
allowed, nor wiU the People allow him if we may judge by the 
talk of sensible men and women who can distinguish between 
patriotism and destructiveness, to smash those of his toy shops 
that are labelled " Made in Germany," and guzzle the sweets 
that they contain. He has much to learn, as have aU babes, 
even the most prodigious. But we cannot instruct him — 
save by keeping him out of mischief — any more than we can 
instruct the individual infants who lord it over us until their 
time comes to take our place. As in their case, a wise provision 
of Nature puts his earliest education into his own hands, not 
into ours. Wide-eyed, this new-born, inarticulate soul of 
the nation absorbs, wonders and watches. Later, he will 
begin to criticise ; his " Why ? " will resound in the land. 
We may reflect with trepidation that our answers will need 
some preparing. He is the " insurgent bigness " of Mr. Wells' 
briUiant fancy, " The Food of the Gods ; " but his giant 
size is the outcome not of invention, as in that book, but of 
her mother Necessity. 
Meanwhile, the people who are in the pre-war generation 
of thought and feelmg, the people regarded as a conscious, 
articulate mind, not yet readjusted to the huge impUcations 
of what is to come, is as sparing of speech and as inscrutable 
of eye as ever. And of that abstract People, since all abstrac- 
tions are no more, really, than figures of speech, it may be 
well to remember that the people who read this paper are 
a concrete, realisable part. When we ask the question as the 
office-dweUers so often ask it in vain, " What are the people 
about ? " or, in the words of the philosopher Caddies, " What's 
it aR/or ? " there is something to be said for narrowing down 
the enquiry into the form of " What am I about ? What do I 
mean ? What do my family, my business, my interests mean ? " 
Or, for that matter, " What does ' Land and Water ' mean ? " 
To the last question the consistent reader will return a 
simple answer : It means among other things the best 
critical analysis of the momentous operations on land and 
sea which are shaping the destinies of Europe — an analysis 
that is free from bias and uncoloured by controversy : 
it means facts, and clear, straightforward reasoning about 
facts. When we connect this idea of a meaning with 
our part responsibility for the parenthood, small though 
that part may be, of the nation's new spirit, we may reflect 
that our small share is not unpractical. The finer the child, 
the greater its destiny, the more it needs, in the first stages, 
simply — nourishment. And fact, properly presented and 
co-ordinated, is the nourishment of reason, even as reason is 
the stuff of which the things of the spirit are built up. The 
new spirit of the nation, the spirit, for instance, to take the 
clearest and the most cogent case, of the men who return 
when the long job is done, will be a spirit that knows, and 
seeks to know, new things, and a spirit that thinks. We 
must be prepared ; we must be ready to see many old shells 
broken, many unforeseen products of " insurgent bigness " 
arising. But we shall not be unworthy of the new life. Give 
the English people a chance, and they can adapt themselves 
to anything, within reason. 
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