IV
A century of almost unbroken European peace—unbroken, that is, by wars hugely destructive—had built up insensibly in men’s minds a consciousness of an unbounded general stability in the political as well as in the physical world. The crust of the political globe seemed to have caked, on the whole, almost as hard and cool as that of the elderly earth. It felt as if it were so firm that we could safely play the fool on it, as boys jump on the ice of a pond and defy it to break under them. So an immense tolerance of political rubbish had grown up. On decade after decade of indulgence the man of booming phrases and grandiosely noble professions had swelled into a marvel of inflation surpassing any barking frog at the Zoo. That doing of hard and plain work well, which is the basis of all right living and success in men or nations, had grown almost dull in the sight of a people who took too seriously the trumpetings and naggings of the various fashionable schools of virtuosi in political blatancy. It would not be common sense to suppose that no psychological change of any moment would, in any case, have been wrought by a passage from that substantially stable world into a world in which the three great empires of Continental Europe have been ground to dust like Ypres. Anyhow, the adventure of finding our cooled and solid earth turning once more into a ball of fire under the foot would not have left the state of our minds quite as it had been. They are all the more changed now that most of us feel we have pulled through the scrape, scorched and battered, by our own sweat, and not by the leadership of those to whom we had too lazily given the places of mark in that rather childish old world before the smash came.
Some of the chief ingredients in the new temper are a more vigilant scepticism; a new impatience of strident enunciations of vague, venerable, political principles; a rough instinctive application of something like the new philosophy of pragmatism to all questions; and an elated sense of the speed and completeness with which institutions and powers apparently founded on rock can be scoured away. Great masses of men have become more freely critical of the claims of institutions and political creeds and parties which they used to accept without much scrutiny. It is not a temper that need be regarded with terror or reprobation. In itself it is neither good nor bad. It is the raw material of either good or evil, accordingly as it is guided—of barren destruction or of bold repair and improvement. But it is formidable. For men who have seen cities pounded to rubble, men who with little aid or guidance from their own rulers have chased emperors from their thrones, are pretty fully disengaged, at last, from the Englishman’s old sense of immutable fixity in institutions which he may find irksome or worthless. “There’s comfort yet. They are assailable.” If the Holy Roman Empire has been knocked into smithereens, what public nuisance need remain?