Compared with their fathers, the men of that time were ceasing to ...

Compared with their fathers, the men of that time were ceasing to be a ruling or a reasoning stock; the English mind sank towards that easily excited, easily satisfied, state of barbarism and childhood which press and politics for their own ends fostered, and on which in turn they fed: 'and we think, with harms at the heart, of a land where, after Titanic births of the mind, naught remains but an illiberal remissness', of intelligence, character, and purpose.

That time has left its scars and poison with us, and in the daily clamour for leadership, for faith, for a new heart or a new cause, I hear the ghost of late Victorian England whimpering on the grave thereof. To a mature and civilized man no faith is possible except faith in the arguement itself, and what leadership therefore can he acknowledge except the arguement whithersoever it goes? But the great age is not so far behind us that we must needs have lost all its savour and its vigour.

It takes some effort to think of England, in this autumn of 1936, as in any special sense the home of the disinterested mind, as very noticeably illuminated by the lights of arguement and reason.

But Carisbrooke keep goes under in gloom Now it overvaults Appledurcombe: and if they go out here, what ages must pass before they shine again?