328 ENGLISHSAGA

world Power like Britain, dependent on public confidence and
peaceful dealing between nations, could not ignore the repeated
challenge to international law and decency. As before in her
history, she had to uphold public order in the world. A world
without public order was not a world in which England could
exist.

True to her past, her people took up the challenge. But even
as they did so they knew instinctively that they were- in some
peril of fighting not only to destroy evil things but to preserve
them. They were resolved to put an end to Hitlerism, for apart
from their resentment at brutality and cruelty, they knew that.
their own frustrated dream could never be fulfilled by violence.
In resisting it they were unconsciously protecting an unborn and .
gentler English revolution. But they did not want to destroy a
false totalitarianism merely in order to make the world safe a
second time for the system that passed, however unfairly, under
the name of "Chamberlainism." The young men who, ill-
equipped and abandoned by their allies, triumphantly and in the
face of all expectation, fought their way intact to Dunkirk out
of what threatened to be the biggest military disaster in British
history, were not doing so for the sanctity of dividends or the con-
tinuance of profitable speculation in shares and conimodity
prices. They were fighting—though they still only knew it
hazily—for the dream for which the forgotten dead had died
xa quarter of a century before,
4 • •••••••

i In a hundred years England had come full circle. The laws
that govern human existence may seem inscrutable. Yet they
possess one ruling principle—that of ultimate justice. This can-
not be perceived by a generation that glorifies the individual at
the expense of the living society. For it is not the guilty
individual who is punished or rewarded but the commonwealth of
which he is part. The rulers or electors who neglect eternal
truth may escape retribution. Their innocent descendants cannot,
i Because of an unbalanced obsession with the individual,
private profit-making—formerly regarded merely as a means to
the acquisition of that modest ownership that makes virtuous
and free men—became accepted as an end itself. But for certain
indestructible elements in the English character it might have
become the only end. In the sphere of economics, covering nine-
tenths of man's daily life, the test of every activity, increasingly