THE NEW SPIRIT IN ENGLAND.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 3222, 9 January 1917, Page 2

THE NEW SPIRIT IN ENGLAND.

(From the New York "Tribune.") No one who follows closely the press and the public statements of the British Islands can tail to perceive that for some months there has been a very marked change coming in all that should reveal the spirit and thought of the British people. Mr. Garvin, in his admirable letter published in the "Tribune," discusses and discloses this, but his is only one voice among many. The thing that one must see and feel is that, after Jong delays, after hesitations and dubitatdons, the real significance of this struggle to all that England means to her millions of people and all the Empire means alike to Britain and those Who dwell in the lands beyond the seas, "The Dominions," as the contemporary phrase has it, has got home. There were weeks and there were months when it seemed as if the British people alone of tlie great peoples engaged in the war failed to grasp the deadly seriousness of the issues at stake. There was a time when Britain's Allies as well as Britain's friends, looked with apprehen sion and frank bewilderment at the apparent lack of clear vision or accurate appraisal of the struggle in England. '

How much of this was real, how much due to the habits of mind and expression of the Englishman, one may not say. Yet it is true that the British people as a mass far less clearly perceived the actual situation in Europe in July, 1914, than did the people of any other nation in Europe. Above all, they perceived less clearly than any other people that the fate of the British Empire was at stake, and that the real design of German policy was to destroy the foundations of the British Empire. Tangier, Bosnia, Agadir, the three crises that preceded the storm, carried their full meaning to France, to Russia, to Austria and to Germany. There were millions of Frenchmen who said after Tangier that the hope of permanent peace had gone; there were few Frenchmen after Agadir who believed a general war could long be postponed. When the Austrian ultimatum was uttered France ami Russia alike had neither doubts nor hopes. In Paris, as in Petrograd, men said to each other, "So, it has come at last," and the whole course of French and Russian statesmanship in the last days of the last crisis showed together with a willingness to make any sacrifice for peace a clear conviction that war was inevitable. This was not true of British statesmanship, of British leadership. Blinded by his illusory influence in tho Albanian time. Sir Edward Grey clung long to the hope that peace could fie preserved, and, taking their views from tlieir statesmen, the mass of tho British people looked on the whole Servian affair as one more " incident," one more in the series of newspaper crises that would be settled after some delay and bad temper, as the three preceding crises had been. The greatest fault of the British Government in the years of LiberalRadical supremacy had been that t had misunderstood its Europe, and permitted its people to become totally oblivious to the exact state of world affairs. Thus, when war came it came almost in the night, and it came to n people not yet advised of the issues, not yet aware of the German aims and ambitions, not yet conscious of comprehending that a new Napoleonic peril, even more dangerous than Louis XIV., had arisen on the Continent, and that it was not the question of Servia, which concerned -10 Englishman nearly, but the life of the ■Empire that was in the balance. One can trace, if he -chooses, the slow but steady growth of Britis'i understanding of the meaning of the war to Britons. It 'is not an easy or a simple thing for 40,000,000 of people to pass from the stale of mind of peace to that of war suddenly. Even Belgium, while it momentarily fired the chivalry and awakened the sympathy of the masses of Britons, did not serve to bring home the_ lesson that it was to make Britain another Belgium tliat Germany had undertaken her great wai. A democracy, plunged oyer ten years into the most engrossing and absorbing of domestic quarrels and political warfares, its ears filled with the forecasts not of foreign wars but of civil strife, classes of its population turned against other classes, all thought of the outside world extinguished, its mind obsessed by vague and vain Utopian ideas of the arrival of universal peace, suddenly found itself at war with a nation whose destructive purposes it did not understand, whose deliberate, if stealthy, preparation it had not seen, whose propaganda of hate it did not distinguish. What followed over a year and more than a year was the process of moral and intellectual mobilisation of Britain. France was an open frontier; the memories of 1870 and a closer knowlege of Germanism mobilised in mind and soul with the coming of war. But neither in body nor in soul could the British people mobilise until that hour when they perceived at last what was actually at stake. And in all those long months there is the blindness and wandering of the many redeemed by the heroism of the few—the bravest and clearest visioned of Englishmen, who answered the first call and died that their fellow countrymen might ultimately team the truth. What is true to-day is that the lesson is learned. Millions of Englishmen who saw little of the meaning of the strife two years ago see, believe, feel all now. From one end of Britain to the othe-r there is at last a clear recognition of the fact that when the war Iras ended the fate oF the Britisn Empire as far as man can see into the future will have been decided and the future of the institutions and the ideals which are the permanent meaning ot Britain in the world will have been abolished or preserved. No man can put his finger on the calendar and say that on this day the change came. It didn't come thus. Little by littlo more and more light was brought to Brilain by those who came fro the battle fields of Flanders and of France. Tho German idea, the German method and tho German purpose were disclosed, while ever in British ears there sounded loudly and still more loudlv the chant of that Hymn of Hate which at first had roused only wonder and amazement Waking from a long sleep, the Englishman was confused by the noise that he heard and the chaos about him. His leaders, his statesmen, his prophets had gw"Jj£ no warning; he had had no authentic promise of the, storm such as had como to Slav or Latin. . But there was a day when he understood. Perhaps the terrible agonyof Verdun marks the turning point; perhaps the change had already come, and it was this glorious and ever-memor-able stand of France«t bay ,which served to bring to his lips the woids e SaTalready framed. But it is clear

that in the Verdun days the voice tff Britain began to be heard at home ana abroad, a dear and calm voice speaking the determination of a nation at last conscious of its peril and awake to As duty.

We are accustomed to measure the progress of the war by the oscillation! of battle lines. But, after ail, this is but incidents)l. The defence of France at the Marae was the expression of a whole race, which stood' in its own mind and thought actually at the day of doom, and" knew that with defeat there would be an end of all that France had meant for two thousand years. Less stirring, less moving in the nature of things, but not one whit less momentous in its meaning for the present and tor the future, is the answer that is now coming from Britain, the late but not too tardy answer to that German challenge which on the lips of German soldiers singing Lissauer's Hymn of Hate, on the" wings of the night by Zeppelins in the dark and fog of tlie sea by submarines has been lolling in upon Britain for these two years.

For Britain the war is just beginning, but it is beginning in a spirit that no man who knows British History, who knows the Englsh people, en, mistake. There is o more of the Fpirit that amazed anu shocked a world when the brave handful of regulars went to Mons and to destruction, and Britain blazed with signs of "Business as Usual," aud the mass of the Brrtis.i ]>eople remained in the /eg and dark as to the meaning of the strife beyond the seas. Not only is business not "a« usual'' in Britain now, hut there is no usual business until those who by the million have taken arms return or complete tlieir dutv and remain on foreign battle fields.

Sadly, grimly, the British ore going now about their work. There is no hymn of hate in their resources, they have no "Marseillaise"; theirs will be a slow, silent, but relentless actoin. Between Germans and Britons little quarter will be exchanged, and there will be an ever decreasing complaint liecause of German cruelty. What yon have to feeJ and see is millions of men who are at last awake to the fact that all that life means to them nationally, morally, spiritually, has been threatened. What you did feel of pain and regret that so many Englishmen failed to see this has passed for ever. After the tradition of his race and the fashion of his nation, the Enghenraan, millions of him, has now gone out to kill and be killed until the work that is to be done is done. Once that spirit was clear in England, then those of us who believe that all that America, ns well as all that democracy held best in the world, was at stake in this war, could afford to roll up the war maps and put aside the battle reports. The incidental changes would' mean nothing. "They come so slowly," the Frenchman told you ot his Allies six months ago, but in saying this he added out of his race consciousness of hall a thousand years of Anglo-French conflict, "but when they do come they will never stop." " They" have come; this is a fact 4 once unmistakable and more .significant than all that has happened since the battle of the Marne, when French democracy saved the present as British democracy must hereafter secure til© future.