temperamental, and even speaking-out is taken as deceit. The French and the English never have understood one another; and the fact that anything is said to be so, is reason enough, in the mind of the suspicious, for it to be taken as not so. Facts are misread to suit a cherished theory, especially when they are disclosed in the financial or the commercial news. At much the same moment as the franc fell to record at 180 and more, the pound sterling, after years of endeavour, was able to reach and even to pass par value. Evidence enough that underhand work had been going on somewhere, and that our frankly friendly words, our apparent concentration upon games, and all the rest of the casual incidents and careless formalities of our social and civic life, were merely an hypocrisy, a perfidiousness, disguising plots and conspiracies for the benefit of the British pocket. The circumstance that we have honestly tried to make the League of Nations work successfully is openly regarded by many, who really ought to know better, as due to our wish to use that organisation for the exclusive benefit of British interests.

A few weeks ago Mr Timothy Michael Healy, the Governor-General of the Irish Free State, at a demonstration in Dublin, partly in humour, but also much in earnest, warned his hearers against regarding the English as stupid. They are the cleverest people in the world, he said; and the statement was as partial and erratic as the theory he then was combating, that we are fools. He suggested that our alleged obtuseness was a pose or blind under which we secured all that we wanted. And yet we have not the right to claim any such gifts of extraordinary astuteness or cunning. It is not so much cleverness, as a shrewd common sense, that is generally shown. Plenty of brain is given to the discussion of questions in business and over the ordinary considerations of life; but the man of easy epigram is a little distrusted, and assertions as to everyday facts are more willingly accepted if they are not expressed too brilliantly. A plain statement, reasonably put, is invariably the most effective. The general ability of the country, in spite of the talk over an inadequate educational system, must be not far from the average; but the normal mind is honest, and has simplicity; and,

whether we know it or not-whether we like to confess it or not-those are the qualities which prevail, especially in the regions of the trader and the politician. Trustworthiness is proved a convincing fact; and the British word, in spite of the legendary perfidiousness, remains as good as a bond.

Though energetic enough at times of particular need, we often are indolent. The Englishman is generally ready to leave off work with a punctuality in some respects almost unbecoming. Also, there is truth in the idea that we have a tendency to muddle through difficulties-again a result of laziness and the disinclination to buckle-to. If, in our vanity, we desired to dispute the assertion, there would be evidence enough against us in every single war that we have fought since Harold fell at Senlac. Always it takes a time, and often a critical time that is heavily costly and very nearly fatal, to get things efficiently going; but when the necessary organisation at last is established and the crisis properly tackled, the system of no other nation has proved more effective. The Great War gave infinite examples of this absolute unreadiness, and then of the eventual first-class efficiency of the British people. In improvising armies; in turning out munitions; in staffwork, despite the gibes of the humorists; in the efforts made to counteract the devices of foreign spies and in our own elaborated systems of espionage; in tactical resourcefulness and camouflage; in realising such wellthought-out and heroic ventures as the crowning exploit at Zeebrugge; indeed, in a thousand ways before the War came to its end, the British had established themselves as second to none in organised and general individual efficiency.

And so it was in the strike of the other day. The attack of the Trades Union Council was sudden; but there had been, for a wonder, some counter preparations with the enlistment of volunteers and the elaboration of general plans of action and precaution on the part of the authorities; so that, within a few hours, parks were closed, and depôts of necessities established within them, services were organised, and thousands of free workers enlisted to collect, distribute and carry on. Muddle was thus avoided, because there really was no time for the Vol. 247.-No. 489.

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luxury of delay; and, backed by the cheerfulness of the ordinary man who went about his business as best he could, the stop-gap efficiency and cheerful courtesy and humour of the volunteer dockers, lorry-drivers, busconductors, railway engineers, guards, and porters, and the special constabulary, both mounted and on foot, caused the conspiracy of the General Strike to collapse.

It was a further example of what the spirit of the Nation can accomplish in a crisis. The unbreaking cheerfulness, the inability to recognise defeat which so often has held through an impossible day in war-time, those are the qualities that again and again have carried the British safely past the ultimate stress. Mr Page, in his letters to President Wilson and others in the United States, paid tribute to that spirit, and it is impossible to read his testimony, especially that given to the womanhood of England, without a sense of grateful pride which moved one to the depths. As the American Ambassador, Mr Page was frequently interviewed by the mothers of sons who had been captured and were in prison in Germany, or were dead; and never a word of complaint, not even the slightest concession to tears on the part of any one of them, came, although obviously anxieties and sorrow were there. A deep suffering was borne with silence. Once, he tells us, a woman bearing a British name, the wife of an Englishman, coming to him in the days when America was still neutral, to enlist his help for her unfortunate son in Germany, broke out with a clamour of grief. He discovered afterwards that she was entirely foreign by birth, and so explained the outburst which the experience of many hundreds of bereaved mothers had shown him was noticeably exceptional.

It is not in any spirit of boasting or vanity or complacency that these passing estimates of national character are here set down; but it is well for once to place upon record the pride that we feel in our fellows, especially as these racial qualities are generally unrecognised. Doubtless, the love of playing games and of witnessing them; a determination to keep the rules of cricket, football, boxing; team-work, as in rowing, where the individual must subordinate his personal idiosyncrasies to a serviceable co-operation with the rest of the crew, have brought out qualities which prove

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helpful in the stress of serious days, when to win at a Spastime is as nothing compared with the odds of death and destiny, newly and finally at stake. Calmness, the readiness to restore conditions when the game is being lost, cheerfulness under defeat and a hand-clasp of good fellowship with the victors; such aspects of moral courage as these, discovered and developed in the playing fields, are priceless when it comes to the crises, inevitable, of international or of civil strife and danger.

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It is rare now in England even for mobs to be vicious, while there was ample testimony during the late strike of a fraternal and friendly spirit between the men out of employment and the police protecting works and pickets. Considering the vastness of the areas of distress, there was extraordinarily little violence; and this satisfactory condition, doubtless, was largely due to the fact that the working-man knows as well as the more comfortable citizen how to play the game, and realises the truth that in the long run it is no help to him or to any one to break the accepted rules of fair play.

Lord Grey of Fallodon referred recently to 'the soul which exists in nations.' This soul was unquestionably evoked during the Great War, but some amongst us may possibly have been led to fear that grievous inroads had been made upon it by the persistent and insidious alien campaign of propaganda which had been used since 1919, to instil discontent and revolutionary ideas among the working classes. If that was so, these doubters may be reassured by what happened in May. Mr Baldwin's wise and conciliatory speeches found a ready response in the 'soul which exists in the nation.' Even the strikers recognised that the Prime Minister was dealing fairly and squarely with them, and their conduct under severe temptation to violence was, in general, exemplary. Foreign observers were astonished to see a revolution pass away without bloodshed and to hear of strikers enlisting as Special Constables, but what astonished them most was the fact that in the heat of the crisis strikers and policemen were engaged in a friendly football match. It may truly be said that sport, with the necessary spirit of fair play, is an essential in the soul of the British people.

Happily, as well as moralising over national characteristics, we are able to find a generally accepted example to illustrate the truth of the main assertion of this article. Such an example is available in a man, an Englishman, a minister—him we have just mentioned— to whose honesty, simplicity, sincerity and common sense, tributes have rightly come from all parties of the State, and from both sides in the recent conflict. When in an angry debate in the House of Commons, on the Monday after the collapse of the Strike, Mr Baldwin suggested that his record stood for the keeping of his word, there was a general cheer. It is such testimony as that which sweetens public life, and shows the spiritual unity of the British people, in spite of diversities of wealth, party, culture and condition. The Prime Minister is a typical Briton. His sincerity more than anything else, led-not so much, perhaps, to the collapse of the strike as to the settlement of the general national difficulty by restoring the public confidence and good temper. Although, possibly, there have been more powerful and more ingenious minds among those in the responsible places, none-not even among the very greatest of heart and intellect in the long record of our island race—having won, has better deserved to enjoy the confidence of the community than Mr Stanley Baldwin. The Prime Minister has attained this high place in the pride and honour of his fellow-citizens because he has shown and proved certain essential qualities which we claim are commonly and peculiarly British. It is because of them that we are proud of our imperial citizenship and heritage; and are confident that, so long as those characteristics continue, Great Britain and the British Commonwealth of Nations will remain the foremost spiritual and political power and influence for human good in the world.