Nothing is more illuminating and self-educational than to explain one's home politics to an intelligent foreigner enquirer; it strips off all the secondary considerations, the allusiveness, the merely tactical considerations, the allusiveness, the merely tactical considerations.One sees the forest not as a confusion of trees but as something with a definite shape and place.I was asked in Italy and in France, "Where does Lord Northcliffe come into the British system--or Lloyd George? Who is Mr.Redmond?
Why is Lloyd George a Minister, and why does not Mr.Redmond take office? Isn't there something called an ordnance department, and why is there a separate ministry of munitions? Can Mr.Lloyd George remove an incapable general?..."I found it M.Joseph Reinach particularly penetrating and persistent.It is an amusing but rather difficult exercise to recall what I tried to convey to him by way of a theory of Britain.He is by no means an uncritical listener.I explained that there is an "inner Britain," official Britain, which is Anglican or official Presbyterian, which at the outside in the whole world cannot claim to speak for twenty million Anglican or Presbyterian communicants, which monopolises official positions, administration and honours in the entire British empire, dominates the court, and, typically, is spurred and red-tabbed.
(It was just at this time that the spurs were most on my nerves.)This inner Britain, I went on to explain, holds tenaciously to its positions of advantage, from which it is difficult to dislodge it without upsetting the whole empire, and it insists upon treating the rest of the four hundred millions who constitute that empire as outsiders, foreigners, subject races and suspected persons.
"To you," I said, "it bears itself with an appearance of faintly hostile, faintly contemptuous apathy.It is still so entirely insular that it shudders at the thought of the Channel Tunnel.
This is the Britain which irritates and puzzles you so intensely--that you are quite unable to conceal these feelings from me.
Unhappily it is the Britain you see most of.Well, outside this official Britain is 'Greater Britain'--the real Britain with which you have to reckon in the future." (From this point a faint flavour of mysticism crept into my dissertation.I found myself talking with something in my voice curiously reminiscent of those liberal Russians who set themselves to explain the contrasts and contradictions of "official" Russia and "true"Russia.) "This Greater Britain," I asserted, "is in a perpetual conflict with official Britain, struggling to keep it up to its work, shoving it towards its ends, endeavouring in spite of its tenacious mischievousness of the privileged to keep the peace and a common aim with the French and Irish and Italians and Russians and Indians.It is to that outer Britain that those Englishmen you found so interesting and sympathetic, Lloyd George and Lord Northcliffe, for example, belong.It is the Britain of the great effort, the Britain of the smoking factories and the torrent of munitions, the Britain of the men and subalterns of the new armies, the Britain which invents and thinks and achieves, and stands now between German imperialism and the empire of the world.I do not want to exaggerate the quality of greater Britain.If the inner set are narrowly educated, the outer set if often crudely educated.If the inner set is so close knit as to seem like a conspiracy, the outer set is so loosely knit as to seem like a noisy confusion.Greater Britain is only beginning to realise itself and find itself.For all its crudity there is a giant spirit in it feeling its way towards the light.It has quite other ambitions for the ending of the war than some haggled treaty of alliance with France and Italy; some advantage that will invalidate German competition; it begins to realise newer and wider sympathies, possibilities of an amalgamation of interests and community of aim that is utterly beyond the habits of the old oligarchy to conceive, beyond the scope of that tawdry word 'Empire' to express...."I descended from my rhetoric to find M.Reinach asking how and when this greater Britain was likely to become politically effective.
