372 ENGLISHSAGA

to do with country or empire but was entirely their own affair.
That if called on to do so, they would die for their King and
Country was not to be doubted. They sat, red-cheeked and clear-
eyed, in Pall Mall dubs or the Pavilion at Lord's, shot, hunted and
fished in the appropriate seasons and transacted business in board-
room or on 'change according to the unalterable laws of the
Medes and Persians in which they had been trained. They paid
their way with golden sovereigns and ruled the earth beneath
tall silk hats in an aroma of lavender water and cigar smoke.

After the Boer War, with its early disasters and its long
expensive litany of careless inefficiency, there were some mis-
givings. "Let us admit it fairly,* wrote Kipling,

"as a business people should,
We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no.end of good."

But such frank admissions were only temporary. The poet's
conclusion—"we have had an imperial lesson; it may make us
an Empire yet"—was not borne out by the course of events.
A few months later he was writing savagely of "the flannelled
fools at the wicket and the muddied oafs at the goal"—of a people
who in their wealth and ease grudged even the slightest sacrifice
to arm against the coming day of reckoning:

"Ancient, effortless, ordered, cyde on cyde set,

Life so long untroubled, that ye who inherit forget...

But ye say * It will mar our comfort' Ye say * It will minish
our trade.'

Do ye wait for the spattered shrapnd 'ere ye learn how a gun
is laid?

For the low, red glare to southward when the raided coast-
towns burn?"

But the only result of the poet's jeremiad was some loss of his
own immense popularity. Everybody read him but nobody paid
the least heed to his preaching.

For the English rich could not see what all the world but
they could see: that their wealth created envy and jealousy,
their empty empire greedy yearnings, their all pervading
never-resting usury anger and resentment. They could not
see that other nations, impatiently seddng outlets for their