Our only English Dictator, Cromwell, has suffered from being sandwiched between a martyred and a merry monarch. And his rule of the Saints was not more acceptable to Cromwell’s contemporaries than his memory has been to us. But to-day, confronted by the prospect of everlasting government, not by Dictators, but Cunctators, we are changing front and on all sides above the click of knitting needles, the clink of port-glass or the clank of trucks, hear the cry: ‘We want a Mussolini.’

Rather more than a century ago, our attitude to the great revolutionary Corsican was to make a bogey of him: ‘Boney will get you.’ Then we opposed foreign political revolutions while inaugurating our own more fundamental Industrial one; to-day we admire the foreigners’ polity and only fight shy of it because it may involve a new economic system also. We cannot help thinking that we might like the Soviets no more than the Saints.