That ‘an Englishman is never so happy as when he is miserable’ is true up to a certain point, but we nave got far beyond that point; hence there is none to the paradox.

Englishmen just now are very miserable indeed, for there is no misery quite so poignant as that which comes from the lowest depths of pessimism. What we need in these days is fervent and true patriotism, and there is a great gulf fixed between patriotism and pessimism.

Patriotism is derided and scoffed at in England, though, curiously enough, not in ireiand, Scotland or even wales. Yet there never was a time when we Englishmen more needed true patriots, a rallying cry and a cause. The trouble is that whilst glorying in our history, we are coming to believe that we have no first-class possibility for the future. We are accepting as a first axiom that we are doomed to become a second-rate country. The peril is not so much our politics as our pessimism; not so much the Dole as the Dumps.

As a country our hopes are deteriorating, our ideals are drooping, our enthusiasms are withering. We are not moving through the desert, we are settling down there. Over England there spreads the pale cast of cynicism. We are losing heart, and when a nation loses heart, it loses everything. It is not that we are making bricks with a shortage of straw, rather that we are building without a plan. We do not know what to build. We quake and whine in the daily press and in the monthly magazines as though we were for ever vanquished.