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.
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