Moonchild

shunning death, avoidance of danger; the other whose defence is attack." "Yes; we're all right so long as we make ourselves feared. But Victorian prudery turned our tigers into oxen; we found that it was wrong fight dangerous to drink beer, wicked to love; presently it was cruel to eat beef, immoral to laugh, fatal to breathe. We went in terror of the omnipresent germ. Hence we are fat, cowardly slaves. I hear that Kitchener is hard put to it to get his first 100,000 men. Only the public schools respond. Only gentlemen and sportsmen really love England — the people that have been cursed these last few years as tyrants and libertines. "Only the men." "And few there are, in the crowd of canaille, old women, slackers, valetudinarians, eaters of nuts!" [309] "God rest the soul of Edward Seventh! I thought all would be well when Victoria died; but now —" "This is no hour of the night to lapse into poetry! Anyhow, Germany is nearly as bad, with her Social Democratic Party." "Do you think that?" cried Cyril, sharply, sitting up. His gesture was indecipherably intense; it seemed utterly disproportionate to Bowling's casual commonplace. "I know it. It's one of the chief causes of the war. The Zabern incident showed the Junkers that they were safe only for a year or two; after that the people would start out to be too proud to fight," replied Lord Antony, anticipating a transpontine chameleon. "And so?" Cyril's voice trembled. A tense thrill ran through his body. He had become sober in an instant. "The Court Party wanted war, to bring back the manly spirit to the nation, and incidentally to keep their place in the sun." The boy sank with a large sigh into his seat. His tone changed to its old supercilious slurring. "Bloody Bill was afraid for his dynasty?" "Scared green." "Don't talk for five minutes, there's a good chap! I've a strange feeling come over me — almost as if I were going to think!" Lord Antony obliged with silence. The five minutes became twenty. Then Cyril spoke. "I had better get to Cripps double quick," said he; "I'm his Intelligence Officer, and I think it my duty to inform him of the plans of the German