*LESTWEFORGETl^w	273
rising manufactures and populations, and armed to the teeth,
were watching amid their jealousies a rich, obese and luxury-
loving Britain as jackals watch a dying lion. Night after night
as the London seasons of the young century sped by, amid the
decorous revelry of the great saloons of Mayfair and the new
hotels—Ritz, Savoy and Claridges—the lords of the earth in their
starched linen, pearls and diamonds enjoyed their goodly
heritage unquestioning. To watchers there seemed to be some-
thing reckless in the feverish speculation and worship of wealth
that had invaded the formerly exclusive society of the Imperial
capital.
* The little Englanders and the Radicals and Socialists who
accepted their kindly but narrow ideology, were no more aware
of the dangers to their existence. To them the Empire seemed
only a financiers* ramp for exploiting the backward races, or at
best an invention of the Tories.^1 That the cheap meat and bread
that fed them came by grace of the foreigner, that others were
toasting the day when the age-long security and empire of the
English should aid, and that their own ways of life in the
crowded cities might unfit them to stand in battle against the
armies of young and jealous nations never troubled them for a
moment They went to their labours in the morning, perused
their Sunday chronicle of murders and sensations, watched the
gladiators of the football League battle in the arena for their
favour, and cheered the cheapjack politicians of the hour who
offered to plunder the rich and distribute the next year's seed-
corn. And a despairing poet, feeling in his heart the imminence
of doom, wrote:
"Now we can only wait till the day, wait and apportion our
shame.
These are the dykes our fathers left, but we would not look
to the same.
Time and again were we warned of the dykes, time and again
we delayed:
Now it may fatt we have slain our sons as our fathers we
have betrayed.*
CXUV* titi*