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.
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