what spirit pursued.
It appears, then, that England has something with which to retort upon the conscious direction to which Germany owes so much of her strength. Among the number of embattled principles and counter principles which this war has brought into the field, we must include as not the least interesting the duel between conscious national direction on the one side and unconscious national will and knowledge on the other.
It is quite outside my province to touch upon the diplomatic events which led up to the war. They seem to me to be irrelevant to the biological type of analysis we are trying to pursue. There can be no doubt at all that the ordinary consciousness of the vast majority of citizens of this country was intensely averse from the idea of war. Those who were in general bellicose were for the moment decidedly out of influence. Can we suppose, however, that the deep, still spirit of the hive that whispers unrecognized in us all had failed to note that strange, gesticulating object across the North Sea? In its vast, simple memory would come up other objects that had gone on like that. It would remember a mailed fist that had been {206} flourished across the Bay of Biscay three hundred years ago, a little man in shining armour who had strutted threateningly on the other shore of the Channel, and the other little man who had stood there among his armies, and rattled his sabre in the scabbard. It had marked them all down in their time, and it remembered the old vocabulary. It would turn wearily and a little impatiently to this new portent over the North Sea. . . . Wise with the experience of a thousand years, it would know when to strike.
Such deeply buried combined national impulses as we are here glancing at are far removed from the influence of pacifist or jingo. Any attempt to define them must be a matter of guesswork and groping, in which the element of speculation is far in excess of the element of ascertained fact. It seems, however, that, as in the case