The great bulk
of the world's work has been done out of their sight and knowledge; it
has seemed unnecessary to trouble much about the general conduct of
things, unnecessary, as they say, to "take life too seriously." This has
not made them so much vicious as slack, lazy, and over-confident; there
has been an elaboration of trivial things and a neglect of troublesome
and important things. The one grave shock of the Boer War has long been
explained and sentimentalised away. But it will not be so easy to
explain away a dislocated train service and an empty coal cellar as it
was to get a favourable interpretation upon some demonstration of
national incompetence half the world away.
It is indeed no disaster, but a matter for sincere congratulation that
the British prosperous and the British successful, to whom warning after
warning has rained in vain from the days of Ruskin, Carlyle, Matthew
Arnold, should be called to account at last in their own household. They
will grumble, they will be very angry, but in the end, I believe, they
will rise to the opportunities of their inconvenience. They will shake
off their intellectual lassitude, take over again the public and private
affairs they have come to leave so largely in the hands of the political
barrister and the family solicitor, become keen and critical and
constructive, bring themselves up to date again.
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