The Cruise of the Nona (continued 3)

There are many parts of the sea where the tide goes round like a clock, and no one can tell you why. Instead of the stream setting first east, let us say, with the flood and then west with the ebb, it goes all round the compass. It sets northwest with the beginning of the flood, then north, then northeast, then east, and so on, looking all round about itself like a performing dog, and slowly and ceaselessly revolving. It behaves not like an eddy, but like spokes. It is perfectly incomprehensible.

There is also this about the tides, which we all know to be true, and which we can see at work any day, but which I defy any man to rationalize: when the tide runs up a narrow river—or, indeed, any river—it will be still running up, say, ten miles from the mouth, when it is running down again, say, five miles from the mouth. What happens in between? Slack water, of course. But how is there slack water? How can the running down be going on at one point and, immediately beyond, the running up, without a division? How can the water go on running up from a reservoir below which it is running down? It does so, and it is all in God’s Providence, and I accept it as I do teeth, or any other oddity. But I will not pretend to explain it.

The sea teaches one the vastness and the number of things, and, therefore, the necessary presence of incalculable elements, perpetually defeating all our calculations. The sea, which teaches all wisdom, certainly does not teach any man to despise human reason. I suppose there was never yet any Kantian fool or worser pragmatist who would not have been cured of his folly by half a week of moderate weather off the Onion. No one can at sea forego the human reason or doubt that things are things, or that true ideas are true. But the sea does teach one that the human reason, working from a number of known premises, must always be on its guard, lest the conclusion be upset in practice by the irruption of other premises, unknown or not considered. In plain words, the sea makes a man practical; and the practical man is, I suppose, as much the contrary of the pragmatist as the sociable man is the contrary of the socialist, or the peaceable man the contrary of the pacifist.

And, talking of pacifists, there is nothing more pleasing to note than the excellent unconscious patriotism of the men and women who solemnly propose that patriotism is the ruin of the world.

There is a delightful irony in observing how intensely national these anti-nationalists are! It is a profound and satisfying thing to watch. Any one can get a good laugh out of the patriotism of men with no nation, or, at any rate, with a nationality very different from that which they profess. It is a common jest, the sham patriotism of the nomads. But far more subtle and penetrating is the fun of watching your genuine pacifist, who believes the divisions between nations to be evil artifices, soon to be conjured away.

Nowhere are these international pacifists more national than in England. They have all the English spontaneity and love of adventure. They carry to extreme that English love of individual action which we nearly always find associated with their odd political blindness. They nearly all display some trick of clothing or food. They will drink lime-juice instead of wine, or wear elastic-sided boots, or think it wrong to smoke tobacco, or go about without hats. If they are men, they will have hair coming down to their shoulders, which is a very greasy habit. If they are women they will go about barefoot, save for the most absurd sandals; and while they practise all these provincial follies they will be consumed with a passion for the general of mankind.

If you wanted to get a specimen—I do not say of the average Englishman, for he is certainly not that—but of a being in whom the English characteristics are to be found most deeply marked, this pacifist is the very man whom you should choose. All the English conceptions of right and wrong, all the English habits of thought, all the sheltered English attitude towards the great outer world, all the local errors, and much of the local generosity are there present to the full.

I cannot help thinking it a strength to England that the pacifist or internationalist in England should be so intensely English. It prevents any disruptive effect, and it therefore prevents the rivals of this country taking such folk seriously.

The French and Italians are far less happily circumstanced in this regard. In those two countries—and, I suppose, in Spain also, although there I have less knowledge on which to speak—the internationalist is an internationalist, bearing but weakly the common marks of his own people, and willing to act not only against his country politically, but also in all his being, morally and spiritually. A French or Italian internationalist and pacifist will not only sympathise with the enemies of his country, not only give them actively all the help he can, but he will particularly attack the soul whereby his country lives, its traditions and character. If he is French he will hate wine, if Italian, macaroni. But does the English pacifist hate tea? The unrooted man is a very dangerous type, and in England happily unknown. To read anything said or written by such men as Mr. Wells or Mr. Snowden is to read something by people who evidently think of international peace as something closely connected with cricket, teetotalism, and the use of Bible language—coupled, of course, with a reverent agnosticism, which means a wearied puritanism.

I have spoken of their courage, and certainly the courage of the typical conscientious objectors during the War was an arresting thing.

One of the most famous had been a fairly close acquaintance of mine many years ago. I had known him to be a man of eccentric nature, hardly mad. But I could not have believed he would have stood up as he did to the martyrdom which he was made to suffer. The violence of his protest against all violence was an admirable thing.

A lesser form of the paradox in these people is their hatred of the French, and their passion for Prussia. This love of Berlin would seem to be compounded of two elements, partly a natural desire to support the losing side, but much more the strong religious sympathy they have with the Northern German in Europe, and the hatred they feel (very naturally!) for the Catholic culture, of which the French are the chief representatives.

They preached a universal similarity. Yet there were very few of them who would not have joyfully watched the most bloody war against the French at any time after the Armistice, and none of them would have doubted one moment of the issue: for they had prepared for war in the best of all possible fashions by refusing to arm. Such men are confident that their country must be victorious, for, in their childish minds, anything strange and foreign seems naturally weak, and doomed to extinction.

You see, I plead for the fools. But although I like these eccentrics for their sincerity and for their spontaneous virtue under persecution, yet I cannot associate with any of them long. They make me nervous—and I think this effect is due to something insane about them.... Anyhow, they are national, and that is always to the good.

I have noticed that this kind of fanatic, like every other kind, is in two species; the species which too clearly thinks out its own insane theory, and the species which remains perfectly muddle-headed.

I had a long talk lately in the ruins of the town of Rheims with one of these people. He was drinking a sort of special fizzy coloured water, which he had imported, and which he worshipped because no man could become drunk thereon. He was doing very noble work in helping people who had lost their homes. He was a ‘Helper’—and all the rest of it. He was also occupied in spreading the Gospel, under the reservation, of course, that it was not true; at least, as he was careful to explain to me, he ‘was not emphasising the miraculous element.’ This person had a great deal of money, but could none the less reason closely, and he had evidently thought out his subject completely.

He said to me that, by his principles, if he were attacked he ought not to defend himself; and he had a well-constructed answer ready for the obvious objection that people with so strange a creed would soon be destroyed, and that, therefore, all their predication would have been in vain.

He told me that, upon the contrary, the example of non-resistance would spread; and he pointed out that, in fact, throughout history, sacrifice was fruitful, and particularly self-sacrifice. When the body of those who had refused to resist had grown to a respectable size, all European society would be changed; the possibility of attack would be dissolved in an ambient medium opposed to it, and would disappear. He was also ready with an answer to the general objection that his philosophy applied to only one form of human conflict, and left untouched all the other and really more serious forms.

I pointed out to him, for instance, how, in societies like that of modern England, where recourse to physical combat between private citizens had been crushed out by an all-powerful police, there was the more opportunity for injustice and oppression and unredeemed insult. His answer to this I thought curious and worth noting. He said that men did not resent insult very much, and that as for such oppressions as swindling them out of their goods, or cutting them off from all useful information through a control of the press by a few adventurers, these evils were superficial, and soon corrected themselves. He said they did little permanent harm to the human beings who suffered them, but that physical violence on a large scale, as in war, was quite another matter.

I asked him whether he approved of the holding down of subject peoples for produce—as, for instance, for copra or cocoa. He said that he did not; but I found him very wobbly on that point. He took refuge, for a moment, in hypocrisy, and said it was for the good of the oppressed; but he was disturbed.

The man who takes up the cause of subject peoples against his own country is usually of a very different type from the internationalist or pacifist. He is usually a man with a particular romantic interest in that one particular part of the world, and he is usually either a man of independent position through birth and wealth (who feels himself, therefore, fairly immune from the law courts), or a hanger-on of such. And I have noticed that these cranks begin by what is no more than an affectation; but, like all humbug, this affectation brings its own punishment in the shape of a sort of ingrowing false sincerity. Such men almost get to believe in themselves. It never quite comes off. I have never known one of these men, even in his latest days, to be really, fully, and homogeneously sincere. For instance, I have never known one who would hesitate to make money out of the English rule in some part of the Orient while denouncing that rule with fervour, and (no doubt) heartfelt indignation.

There is another curious little point about this sort of people: they are always very proud of being mixed up with the British administration of the dependency in question. They love to point out in conversation how their very opposition has brought them into contact with this, that, and the other important administrator and his class. Usually their birth has made them familiar with that class; for, until lately, the controllers of dependencies were drawn in the main from people of family or from their dependents, and your pro-native crank must be himself of consequence to survive. Were they poor and weak they would be broken.

Upon the whole, I think these anti-Englishmen are an advantage to the State. You may be perfectly certain that they will never go to the length of doing anything active to the hurt of England, and they lend variety and criticism to the external action of England. They make the rivals of England admire a social structure in which such internal strains (which foreigners always exaggerate) are rendered innocuous. If they do any harm, it is by inflating, through reaction, that growing and very dangerous vanity which the public schools and universities have so much encouraged in our generation, and through which most men have come to feel that Fate is necessarily upon the side of their country, that no national disasters need be feared in the future, nor any precautions taken to forestall national decline. The Englishman who says that he wants England out of India, inflames, by reaction, the fatuity of the Englishman who thinks himself in India as one of a Chosen Race.

These pacifists or internationalists of Britain have strongly in them the English hatred of cruelty, and they have in high development the national habit of short cuts in thought; as, for instance, when you may hear them say that war is wrong, which is as much as to say that a house on fire is wrong.

This habit of taking short cuts in thought is often called, not only by foreigners who are unused to the English habit of mind, but by Englishmen themselves, an incapacity for clear thinking. I do not quite agree. As it seems to me, the essential characteristic of this way of speaking and thinking is not its lack of lucidity—for, though that is evident enough, it is not the essential. The essential is the taking for granted of a great many things which are not expressed. This habit of taking short cuts in speech is in some way a habit common to all this group of islands; for the Scotch have it, too, though not so strongly marked as the English; and the Irish have it very pronouncedly indeed: it is far more marked in them than in the English, and is the root of the ‘bull.’

For instance, when a man says that war is wrong, he is saying something which, as it stands, is manifestly nonsense. But if we expand the phrase, it has full and definite meaning. He means ‘for one organised community to attempt destruction and physical pain upon the organisation of another such community, with the object of gain or increase of power, is wrong.’ And so it undoubtedly is. Or, when he says that war is silly and not worth while, he again means (when we fully expand his phrase for him) that such action is commonly so expensive and hurtful, even to those who successfully use it, that it is a bad speculation. In this, indeed, he is not so certainly right as in his first proposition, for most victorious wars in history have handsomely paid the victors; but my point is that this kind of talk, whether about war or anything else, is not due to muddle-headedness; though it goes with muddle-headedness. It is due to a clotting of thought through compression.

One phrase which I very often hear (and which, as it stands, is apparently a piece of bestial unintelligence) may further my point. It is the phrase: ‘Some religion ought to be taught in the schools.’

It is obvious that this phrase as it stands is a contradiction in terms; for the word ‘ought’ can only apply to a moral good; and if such and such a religious system is of good effect, then an opposite and contradictory religious system will be of evil effect. If I think it wrong to murder, if my religion teaches me that murder is a great moral evil, then I teach children in schools that this is so. But if my religion is that of an Oriental body I have heard of, called Thugs, with whom murder is a high religious act, then I teach an opposite set of morals. Both religions cannot be good. One must be good and the other evil. But when you hear people say, ‘Some religion should be taught in the schools,’ what they mean is that ‘the general Protestant ethics of the English people should, on their broader lines, be taught in the English schools.’ They take for granted that every one using the word ‘religion’ means English Protestantism. Having taken that for granted, they shorten their speech in the fashion I have just quoted.

And really such wandering of the mind over this, that, and the other, as I have thus indulged before sleep, in the pleasant little cabin of the Nona (pleasant to me, odious to the pernickety, for it is a hugger-mugger home), watching between the open skylight and the combing a little belt of nightly sky with stars, is a poor adjunct to the scent of the sea, and to the Devon air. To the devil with all reasonings and counter-reasonings and abstractions and argufying: I am for sleep.

We woke early next morning to the noise of the loud clapping of water upon the bows, and I put my head out of the skylight to see little dusty clouds going too quickly across the heavens, and a freshening breeze blowing up from a little south of west, so that all the harbour water was dancing and alive. But the glass was high, and there was no reason why we should not take the sea again, only we must wait for the ebb (which would come in about three hours’ time, nearer nine than eight o’clock). For, in that blanketed part of the river down below, we should never get the Nona out against the flood. Nevertheless, I asked my companion whether it might not be wise to take another man, for we were going down the coast, where the rare harbours were shoal, and not easy to enter, and also small, and lay so that, with such a wind, one would have to beat up to them. An extra hand, such as we had with us during the never-to-be-forgotten business of Bardsey, would be an advantage. Such a hand, therefore, after minute enquiry and searching questions, did we ship; then, all things having been done in their order, and sail set with the second jib and two reefs in the mainsail and one reef forward, we got up the anchor and let her down for the sea.

The hand we had shipped (promising him his journey home by rail within three days at the most) was very well got up in sailor fashion, with his jersey and his peaked cap, the latter worn a trifle to one side, after the fashion of those who are daring, and challenge Æolus. His trousers, it was true, did not spread out at the bottom, like elephants’ feet or the mouths of bells, as do the trousers of sailors upon the stage. On the other hand, he would give them a hitch from time to time—a gesture symbolic of the Main in Drury Lane. He had nothing to do as we dropped down river, for all was trim. He sat and smoked, and watched the water before him with wistful eyes. I think he was by nature a man sad or saddened; and he was very silent.

On the bar there was no end of a lump, and, as we were blanketed by that high cliff, the Nona took it uneasily, chucking up and down with flapping sails and rolling damnably, but in a few moments the strength of the ebb had swept us far enough out to catch the wind again, and we set a course full-and-by; right out for the open, for the large. For we designed to beat in again after a few miles, and so make our way down-Channel towards the Cornishmen.

There was certainly quite enough wind: ‘All the wind there is,’ as an old Irish sailor said to me once during an Atlantic gale so abominable that he and I could not walk against its icy, sleeting December fury, but had to crawl forward tugging along the rail by main force, all up the windward side.... That was a passage worthy of remembrance, for we took three weeks between Europe and the Delaware, the engines and the old frame quite unfit for their task; and in that cheap passage, also, I learnt from a stoker two songs: one called ‘The Corn Beef Can,’ and the other called ‘The Tom Cat.’ They are of the great songs of this world.

A man should learn all the songs he can. Songs are a possession, and all men who write good songs are benefactors. No people have so many songs as the English, yet no people sing less in these last sad days of ours. One cannot sing in a book. Could a man sing in a book, willingly would I sing to you here and now in a loud voice ‘The Corn Beef Can’ and ‘The Tom Cat,’ those admirable songs which I learnt in early manhood upon the Atlantic seas.

There was more wind, indeed, than I liked. We took in the third reef, and went about to the starboard tack, after we had run out so far that we thought we could fetch, upon this tack, the next harbour. As we came near to that town, and saw its roofs far away appear and disappear again behind the crests of unpleasant seas, the Nona heeled suddenly to a much too angry gust. I heard a crash coming from below, and with it the voice of my companion crying, ‘Come down quick and help!’

The Crew (if I may call him so) was sitting forward, hunched up, clutching the weather shrouds, and not happy. I called him to come and hold the tiller, while I should go below to help, and I warned him that she was pulling hard, although she was under three reefs, for we had nothing forward now but the third jib. He looked over his shoulder in a very ghastly way, and shook his head from side to side, as though despairing to be heard in such a wind. I was within a few feet of him, and I bawled, ‘Come and take the tiller! QUICK!’ but again he miserably shook his head, and clung to the shroud. Then did I, commending myself to Saint Elmo (which is a false name, for his real name was Peter, and even Gonzales, and he was the man who was so shocked to find all the Galicians lapsed into a pagan darkness and living in open fun), struggle to make some shift of keeping the tiller up with my right arm stretched back, while I craned my head down below the cabin door to see what was going on downstairs.

The stove had got adrift in the lurch. There was oil all over the place, and a mass of crockery, and everything on the weather side had leapt to leeward, and some little of it trailed in the oil of the floor-boards. It was not more serious than that; for, luckily, the stove was not alight. I shouted to my companion that I could not leave the tiller. I bobbed up my head again and found that even in that short moment she had almost swung into irons. I put her round just in time, and we raced and flew, breasting the seas for that farther little misty harbour town.

The Nona is like those women who are peevish and intolerable under all conditions of reasonable happiness, but come out magnificently in distress. I lie; for the Nona is never peevish and intolerable. What I mean is that in easy weather she is a little sluggish on the helm, and has one or two other small faults, excusable after the fortieth, the fiftieth, year: for she was launched before Plevna, though, it is true, a year or two after Sedan. She has her mortalities; but in a seaway she is magnificent. With her few inches of freeboard, her old-fashioned straight stem, her solid grip upon the water, she takes the sea as though she belonged to it, and so she went that day, riding in highbred fashion, worthy of all praise, and praise she received from me as she leant over and took the combers one after the other. I gave her perpetual encouragement: for no boat will do her best unless she is sufficiently flattered.

Thanks to that increasing wind, the passage was short enough, and what we had said would at most take three days was accomplished between a morning and an evening, for it was still broad daylight when we passed outside the group of rocks of which the chart warned us, and stood within a mile or two of the now distinct houses of that little harbour town, all full of Cornish men.

But the wind still rose, and for the wind to rise when day is falling is a very bad sign. I had no desire to ride it out in the open, and I proposed to get in under the lee of the land (for there was a sort of point there), and not to drop anchor till I could be sure of plenty of water in the harbour later on, when I should make for it on the flood.

My companion came up on deck, from settling things below, and we cast about anxiously for a place where the anchor might be let go.

It was not an easy calculation. She was driving pretty fast. One had to get well under the shelter of the low point, and yet to leave plenty of water beneath one in which to swing. I asked him to go forward and get all ready, and the Crew would help him. But the Crew did not do so.

The sea being now calmer (though the wind was still rising) because we had come under the lee of the point, the Crew did, indeed, stagger forward; but he still held on manfully by the forestay, and looked curiously on my companion’s activity with the anchor as at a novel and a pleasant sight. Beyond that he did nothing; but I think he was proud of keeping his legs so long as he could grasp that forestay. It is no use to argue nor much use to command in the face of imbecility.

I shouted to my companion to let go the chain when I thought the right moment come, and at the same instant brought her up sharp.

The anchor took the ground. We were in, perhaps, five fathom of flood water; for it was full evening, though still light. When we had so lain for a quarter of an hour or so, taking stock of everything around, I asked my companion whether we could not, with the last of the light and the last of the flood, make harbour. The wind was still rising, but we should be running before it towards the not distant pier. Rounding that stonework, we should shoot right into the wind’s eye, when it probably would be broken by the hillside of houses beyond, and, even though we did not know how far the harbour might still be dried out, we should be in safety, with plenty of water beneath our keel for an hour or two more, while we enquired where we should berth. So we decided to risk it, though perhaps wiser men would have ridden out the night where we lay.

She certainly took a great deal of water aboard during that short mile or two, with more and more breakers as we got farther and farther from the protection of the point. Once, when she buried badly, I was afraid the sprit might snap, for I had not housed it. But she carried through all right (though the sprit bent like a willow wand), and we rounded in the gloaming, shot past the pier-end, and dropped anchor immediately inside.

A man hailed us from the shore; we threw him a rope, and he showed us where to berth in water that would just or nearly float us, even at the lowest of the tide.

The Crew was no longer indolent, now that he had left behind him the pitiless waste of the seas and felt once more beneath his feet the solid strength of England. He did what he was told in fastening warps and putting out fenders. Then came the moment for payment: wage and the railway fare home. Before he went over the side I asked him gently whether he had ever been to sea before. He said: ‘Oh, yes, in a manner of speaking.’ I asked him whether he had ever handled a tiller. ‘Not by rights,’ he said. ‘Not in such a boat as this.’ I asked him whether he had any fault to find with the boat. He said no, she was a very good boat so far as he could see, but he did not pretend to understand these things. He went over the side into the darkness. He was and he remains a mystery.

Was he a Charon man who pulled a ferry from shore to shore? Or was he a man who lounged about on the quay, dressed as his companions were dressed, but timid of tumbling water? Or was he a vision? Or a detective? Or an actor? Or one of those writing men who pretend to go to sea in boats, but never do? I cannot tell. I never saw him again.

This episode of the man in sailor clothes with the hitch, who knew nothing of the sea, started my mind upon two ways, which, as they diverged, I could not both follow.

For first it made me think of how we judge by immediate indications—and the taking-in of people through this method is at the basis of most commercial successes; even this poor fellow had made some shillings by it. But also it led me to consider how astonishingly in the modern world we live side by side and know nothing of one another.

There was certainly never a time in the history of Christendom, nor of the paganism that went before it, never a time in the history of our race, when we Europeans (I cannot answer for the Asiatics or the niggers) were so split up, one small set of men knowing nothing about another small set of men at their elbows.

The worst form it takes, of course, is the division between rich and poor, which is quite a modern thing, and an abominable one—the product, I suppose, of what people call ‘democracy.’

Mr. Wilfrid Blunt and I would often talk of this in connection with my own dear county of Sussex. He was much older than I, between twenty-five and thirty years older, and he could, therefore, remember a simpler and a better time than that into which we have descended; yet he confirmed me in my judgment that, no matter how fond a man might be of his country, or how long he might live in it, he would never, if he were of the wealthier, cultivated sort, know the lives of the poor people about him. I had lived among them on and off all my life, and so had he; and I certainly loved them with all my heart, and so did he; but as for knowing how they live or what they really think, there is a gulf dug between us. It ought not to be so.

Apart from this modern separation of the rich from the poor, there are any number of side separations. It is only by an accident that the writing or teaching man knows anything of business, though the commercial man more often knows something of writing. But the greatest anomaly of all, the one that has puzzled me most of a hundred such, is the complete ignorance of what the Catholic Church is and means—the ignorance even of what its doctrines may be. One would think it should be a mere matter of encyclopædias and textbooks—easy for any one to look up. In nations of Catholic culture, of course, the Church is thoroughly well known, even by its worst enemies; but in nations not of Catholic culture the absence of all contact with, and of even elementary information upon, this essential thing, is stupefying.

Here is the corporate tradition which made Europe: the Thing which is the core and soul of all our history for fifteen hundred years, and on into the present time: the continuator of all our pagan origins, transformed, baptised, illumined; the matrix of such culture as we still retain. For any European not to know the elements of that affair is to be in a blind ignorance of all his making, and, therefore, of his self. Yet it is perfectly true that the Englishman or Scotsman, cultivated to excess, saturated with the knowledge of all he thinks there is to know, fatigued and cynical after too much sounding of the world, says things with regard to that great affair which show him to be as little acquainted with its essentials as he might be with another planet. He has many Catholic acquaintances; he probably has some reading of his own country before the death of Elizabeth; he is certain to have read Shakespeare—a writer who wrote for and in a Catholic England, and a writer whose whole atmosphere is Catholic. He may justly pride himself upon his knowledge of the architecture, or even the institutions of the Occident before the great sundering of three hundred years ago. Yet, when he is dealing with this mighty business, he says things more grotesque than anything said by any Colonial about that very governing class to which he himself belongs. He produces an effect, when he touches upon the Faith, which—I say it honestly—is as startling and as comic as the effect produced by those ingenuous millionaires from the backwoods who come barging in among the London subtleties of ancient wealth.

And if this is true—as it is true—of the old governing class, who have some few of them direct family traditions connected with the Faith, nearly all of them relatives and every one of them friends and acquaintances who are Catholic, it is, of course, still more true of the average writing and speaking man of lower birth upon whom general opinion depends.

Now and then one comes across a man who talks or writes with some knowledge, if not of what lies beyond the boundary, at least of the boundary itself; but it is exceedingly rare. The latest example I know of the thing is the preface by Mr. Bernard Shaw, written for his play ‘Saint Joan.’ Here there is a clear recognition of the boundary between the Faith and what lies outside: between the garden and the heath, or marsh.

He is writing there of the voices which Saint Joan of Arc heard, and which determined her mission. He points out that people often hear voices through a morbid faculty of projecting what they have themselves imagined. It is well known that that may happen to any one; and most people recognise that such a phenomenon is within themselves, and has no value of reality. Indeed, pretty well every one has at one time or another vividly heard not-present sounds, whether through the recollection of a loved voice or through some other emotion of fear or violence; and it is only a question of degree whether you call the impression ‘hearing’ or no. He also points out that in the case of diseased people this imaginary stuff takes on a false reality, and that many lunatics, criminal and other, imagine themselves to have heard voices commanding them to do this or that—usually something very unpleasant, nothing half so fine or sane as conducting a triumphant war.

All that is perfectly true. Then he comes to the specific point of Saint Joan’s voices, and he says that, having been brought up a strong Protestant (and, indeed, a strong Protestantism is the note of all his writings), he cannot accept the idea that these voices were real.

Now, there you have a perfectly clear and lucid statement of the boundary between the Catholic world and what lies outside it. The specific difference between the Catholic and the non-Catholic—so far as Europe is concerned—lies in what is roughly called (it is a conversational term, and I do not accept it as accurate) the ‘acceptation of the supernatural.’ The Catholic does not believe that every one who hears voices hears real voices. He does believe that it is possible for such voices to be real; and he, therefore, believes that this thing, philosophically possible, has also had, now and then, a real historical existence.

In the same way, he does not believe nine tenths, or ninety-nine hundredths, of the miraculous stories which have grown up out of distortion or mere wantonness, or (for the greater part) out of the gradual substitution of direct statement for allegorical or fictional statement, turning fairy tales into fact; but he believes that the miraculous—that is, an irregular suspension of the order of nature—is philosophically possible. He, therefore, believes, when the evidence is sufficient, that it has historical existence in certain examples. For instance, I certainly believe that the blinded man of York had his sight restored to him by Saint Thomas of Canterbury; but I don’t believe that Mahommed went to the moon on donkey-back—if, indeed, that mysterious mount of his was a donkey, which the best authorities deny. The Catholic not only believes that certain historical examples, which are of faith, were real and took place (as, for instance, our Lord’s walking on the water—and Saint Peter’s less successful effort), but he also believes in general that the phenomena called miracles continue actually to happen throughout history: that they go on to-day.

The same principle of division runs through the whole of thought. In the matter of the development of religion, everybody outside the Catholic body talks as though the development of the Catholic religion were a human process. They answer the famous question, ‘Is religion of God or of man?’ with a hearty affirmation of the second hypothesis. In this mood they examine such a story as that of the Mass, the Papacy, or the doctrine of our Lord’s divinity. They take it for granted that all was man-made. In this mood they interpret (usually with guesses of the wildest sort, which the much stricter and more rational Catholic scholarship soon disproves) the origin of the Scriptures, and in particular of the Gospels. Now the Catholic admits all evidence in these matters: that is a matter of course, for if you exclude any evidence your conclusion is vitiated. But the difference between him and the others is that he regards the action at work as divine, willed, and, to repeat a word I have used, ‘illumined.’ That is why the Catholic thinks of the modernist as a man of warm heart, but of poor intelligence.

Here is an example. The man of warm heart, with a strong sentimental attachment to his Scriptures, to familiar views, has his mind shaken by the discovery or even the suggestion, that his document is not wholly authentic. His intelligence must tell him—if he would use it—that a document cannot be an authority superior to the body which gave it its claim. But his intelligence falters. Now the Catholic, accustomed to the theory of authority and having decided, let us say, upon evidence sufficient for his judgment, that such and such a text was not part of an original manuscript, could never on that account abandon the doctrine consonant with that text. He believes a doctrine to be a divine, a supernatural thing, communicated, revealed to the world by an authority which still lives, and to and of which he is at once a subject and a part. He says, upon an accepted authority, ‘This is so.’ The presence or absence of one piece of documentary evidence does not affect reality. I have never thought the evidence against the ‘Johannine Comma’ so strong as that in its favour: but, though it were proved unauthentic to-morrow, what possible effect could that discovery have on the reality of the Trinity?

The Faith is an attitude of acceptance towards an external reality: it is not a mood.

Now, of all this the men who elbow the Catholic Church on all sides in non-Catholic communities, such as England, remain as ignorant as they are of Sanskrit—with those few exceptions of which I have spoken. They seem to think that they have in their midst a body of men who go on strangely, either because they refuse to listen to common reason, or because they have a sentimental attachment to some old-fashioned tradition, and will not openly admit its absurdity. In this they resemble the simpler type of bucolic republican, who does not know that there are any arguments for a monarchy; or the still simpler mind which believes that the earth is flat, and thinks that those who call it round are finicky people playing a subtle game in which they do not at heart believe.

Perhaps the best test of the difference is to be found in the doctrine of the Fall. The Catholic, with his acceptation of the supernatural (I again apologise for the term), accepts, upon an authority which he has discovered sufficient (on the statement of a Person, the Church, whose voice he has recognised to be divine), a doctrine that man, as man, was created superior to his present natural state; that he was created to be supernaturally happy. Where, when, and especially how—in what mode—he cannot say. It is a mystery. He, therefore, accepts the doctrine that man, by a rebellion against the will of God, did at some time lose the supernatural powers, the supernatural life, the supernatural happiness, and fell into his natural state, as we see him to-day: of this world, and yet the only exile therein. What that process was whereby he existed with beatitude inhabiting him, we are not told, nor in what place, nor at what date. But we are told, and we accept it, that a certain process, a certain sequence, due to the human will, took place; a rebellion of that will, and a consequent loss of the supernatural life which was our inheritance. That doctrine no more clashes with any proved historical, or probable prehistorical, process than the discovery that William Wordsworth grew up from childhood to manhood proves that he was never a poet, or that he never ceased to be a poet. But the man who rejects the supernatural ignorantly distorts (many popular preachers of heretical theory to-day distort) the doctrine of the Fall of Man into something very different. He thinks it means that man was once in a particular place and time—Mesopotamia about 4004 years ago—behaving like a gentleman, and then, following the advice of his wife, sank to be a perfectly horrible creature, tainting everything he touched. Naturally, a person informed by this childish idea—born, without reason, of a book—on finding what seem to him proofs of development from a simpler to a more complex society, and on waking up to what everybody might know by the use of plain common sense, that men progress from one stage of art to another more intricate (until they crash, and begin all over again), is thrown off his basis. He begins to make a new religion and a new mythology for himself, to talk of an ‘Ascent of Man’; he thinks himself a summit and a glory—and at the same time he rids himself of morals. It will be interesting to watch the end of the process.

In connection with all this—though the connection is strained—I have often wondered to myself, and especially at night-time upon the sea, how long the mystic Catholic doctrine of human equality would survive in the non-Catholic world. It has survived so far because it is flattering to the many. Only a very small number of men are conspicuously rich or talented, or (for those who love publicity) public; it is naturally an attractive doctrine for the obscure, untalented, poor mass, that—not in the sight of their Creator, for they no longer accept one, but in some incomprehensible way—we are all equal, and that in some odd fashion which they cannot discover, but which they have felt in their bones, the rich or talented or advertised man is really no better than themselves. You find the doctrine lingering most tenaciously in the popular conception of justice. Men would still be shocked, even during the present decline of morals, at the open admission that a man, important for wealth or public position, should be admittedly and overtly immune from the criminal law. In practice, of course, he is so. But so much of the old Catholic dogma of human equality survives as forbids—so far—the open admission of privilege.

But flattering as the old Catholic doctrine of equality is, I do not think it can survive much longer outside the Catholic body. It is in a high degree mysterious, and I am amused to find one man after another suddenly making the discovery that it is not a patent truth, apparent upon the surface of things.

I remember once sitting next a very worthy man at a banquet in the United States: it is now nearly thirty years ago. This man explained to me laboriously enough, but very privately, that the statement in the Declaration of Independence, ‘Men are created equal,’ seemed to him great nonsense. For he had come to observe that they were of different stature, muscular strength, and even intelligence—in which last conclusion I supported him.

There is another Catholic mystery to which the non-Catholic world still uncertainly clings (I do not think its tenure is at all secure), and that is the mystery of immortality.

That also is consoling, and to some even flattering. It can be used as a soothing drug on condition that you do not work out the full theology of it, and admit the double doom of beatitude and damnation. But the repetition of this old Catholic doctrine as a dope, by which may be evaded the menace and reality of death, does not seem to me to have enough stuff in it to endure. Yet there are many men and women still living who can remember the time when the non-Catholic world did still accept the full doctrine.

Indeed, a living friend of mine has recited to me a verse learnt in her childhood, which ran somewhat as follows:

I wonder, indeed, how much of Catholic doctrine will survive, and what part of it—if any—in whatever of Europe continues to reject the present advance of the Faith. That some great section of Europe will lose the last savour of Christian culture, and that soon, is probable; for already the half-educated are abandoning it all over the North. That the rest will return to full doctrine is probable. For already the thirst for it is apparent, and the stronger minds are so returning. But what will follow where it is wholly abandoned? We know what heavy weather property is making to-day, and, as for marriage, it has nearly gone by the board. The doctrine of justice is cloudily remembered, but mixed up in some muddled way with the idea of playing a lawyer’s game, and so sodden with sentimental frailties, and rough-edged with cruelties and sale and purchase, that one can make nothing of it. For instance, outside the Catholic world, it is an accepted idea that if a man accused of murder be under grave suspicion, but not definitely proved guilty, he must, indeed, be condemned to some horrible punishment, such as imprisonment for life, but not to the punishment for murder. And it is an approved idea that punishment should not be vindictive, but only deterrent, save where the vindictive side of it is the vengeance of the great against the weak. And it is an approved idea that the witness in a legal case may justly be confused and harried in order that the truth shall be concealed; and that capacity of so confusing and harrying a witness is the great test of a man’s moral aptitude to administer Justice. And it is an approved idea that a lawyer may do his utmost to have an innocent man condemned, if only he be paid highly enough. But the breakdown of the idea of justice is only one department of the great change. There are a score of others to be surveyed; notably the novel doctrine that a man’s wealth is the test of his value in the State.

Well, what will come out of that welter, that corruption into which the decomposition of the Christian culture is now dissolving?

What I think will spring out of the filth is a new religion.

I think there will arise in whatever parts of Christendom remain, say, two hundred years hence, cut off from the advancing restoration of the Faith, some simplified, odd, strong code of new habit, comparable to the sudden code of habit which Arabia constructed on the ruins of Christian doctrine in the East. Whatever refuses to accept the Catholic restoration will sooner or later develop a new religion, because human society cannot live on air, and to men of our strong Western blood the substance of a doctrine and a ritual are especially needful. This conception of a new religion (and, therefore, an evil one) arising out of the rottenness of the grave of truth, seems to-day at once fantastic and unpleasant. Unpleasant I admit it is; fantastic I do not believe it to be.

From that Cornish town I had the next morning to make my way back to London; and Stephen Reynolds, whom I met, got her round the land safely to the ports upon the southern side, whence later I resumed this cruise: Stephen Reynolds, that strongest-souled and most sincere of men, who desired and did good all his life. It is the meeting with such men, and the comparison of their public label with their true function, of their false renown or lack of renown with their certain standing in the eyes of their Maker, which lead all wise men to a perfect contempt for the modern world.

Does any one remember him now of those who are reading this? Perhaps one or two, perhaps no one. He loved the poor: he understood the sea. He was a brother and a support to sailing-men, and he had charity, humility, and justice in equal poise. But the truth is, I take it, that our world is no longer fitted for governance by, nor even for advice from, its rare great men. It is fitted for governance by those who boast so exact an admixture of folly and of vice as makes them reasonably consonant with the stuff they have to govern. As for those who are too good for us, or too wise for us, why, the sooner they are out of it the better for them. And so it is the better with Reynolds....

But I wish that I could come across him again in this world, somewhere at the meeting of sea and land, and talk with him again about the schools of fishes, and the labours of those who seek them along our shores, and the souls of sailormen.

I confess to a complete ignorance of going round the land, that is, of turning the point of Cornwall, and of passing from the northern to the southern coast. Three times have I set out from Saint Ives with the firm intention of passing the Longships, and putting her round up-Channel. Never have I done so. For the Seven Gods, or one or another of them, forbade it. Had I ever fallen so low as to put a motor into the Nona, she would have gone round like a bus or a taxi; but under sail alone it was forbidden me. Each of those three times I started with a light wind and was becalmed; and at the end of the each of those calms I drifted back so far upon the flood that I sickened of the attempt. Saint Ives is a very long way from London, and a still longer way from Sussex, and a man cannot spend his life indefinitely taking that immense journey back and forth for nothing. And that is why I sent the Nona round the land.

I have never made Newlyn. I have never gone into Falmouth, so there is still something left for me to do. I have, indeed, seen all that coast from within, and walked back and forth across the last peninsula of England, and compared Mounts Bay and its rock with the towering brother island upon the further shore: for every such sea-girt height is dedicated to Saint Michael, being a natural perching place for winged things. The two Mounts are little models of the two national histories: each begins as a monastery; but one becomes a king’s prison, then derelict, then a sort of national showplace; the other becomes a country house.

You may trace a parallel in the fate of the Templars in the two capitals. The secret society of the Templars, with its gigantic wealth and universal conspiracy, was suppressed (to the salvation of Europe) six hundred years ago. Their centre in Paris fell to the King, became in its last stages an appanage for younger sons and cousins of the Crown, then a prison. It was at last destroyed in the very beginnings of the new Paris under Napoleon. Its memory has almost disappeared.

The Templars’ centre in London passed gradually to the lawyers, and now fulfils, among other functions, the very useful one of preventing cabs from getting too quickly from the Embankment to Fleet Street.

As for the two round churches, the mysterious symbols of that great, now dead, freemasonry (which for a moment threatened all our lives), that one in which the Mass was preserved has disappeared from that capital of Europe where the Mass has perhaps most power, but that from which the Mass was driven out is still carefully maintained in its externals, and stands there still in the midst of London—dead.

It was upon this coast of Cornwall that I once, to my shame, wholly misread the outline of a headland, not from sea but from land.

Standing upon the shoulder of the Lizard peninsula, and looking eastward upon a clear summer’s day, I misread the Dodman. Now from land this is unpardonable, because one has on land points of reference, and, indeed, had I been careful, and with a map before me, I could not have made such an error. But from the sea it is a thing that happens very much oftener than sailing-men are willing to admit.

I remember once, many years ago, coming in from far outside, and making sure of a point of French land, which I thought I knew by heart. I saw a characteristic dip, and, in front of it, the nearer lump of land which I knew for an island, and then there was a gap, or ‘V,’ which I could have sworn to be the harbour town I knew. It is true that I was surprised to find it lying so far over my starboard bow. I had thought it to be right before me, but I trusted my eyes rather than my reckoning. As we drew nearer I found all that inference in error. I had, indeed, failed in my reckoning somewhat, but it was the other way about, and the place I was looking for lay more than twenty miles to the eastward, and, when I first saw land, my harbour was hidden below the last horizon, over the port bow.

One would think that the outline of a headland, once one had known it from a particular side, was an unmistakable thing, and one would think that the same would be true of a characteristic range of hills seen lengthwise, or even of the entrance to a valley harbour.

After all, the same sort of thing is at once recognisable by land: a man does not mistake the Wrekin, or the Malvern Hills.

But at sea, for some mysterious reason, you never can be sure; and that is why such pains are taken in the elaborate descriptions and plans of sailing directions, and in the little pictures which they make in the official books. It is not only a matter of what is called to-day ‘visibility,’ though it is true that the thickness of the air makes a great difference to one’s judgment of distance. No matter what the conditions, the most absurd mistakes can be made, and are made continually, and that by practised men. It was only the other day that I mistook Grisnez for the end of the cliff some miles to the east of it above the flat of Calais. You would think that Beachy Head, seen from up-Channel looking westward, was unmistakable; for it has the exact outline of a hippopotamus, with its little ear and fat forehead and snout, and there is a long flat before it, so that anything rising up, one would think, was bound to be Beachy Head, but it is not so. A man who has been knocking about the Channel at night, and does not quite know where he is, except that he is somewhere off the Sussex coast, may (it sounds absurd, but it is true) take Fairlight in a haze for Beachy Head, or (coming eastwards) he may catch in a dull dawn the low cliffs beyond Newhaven, and, if the thick air hides Beachy from him, he may take these for that headland.

Much more excusable, and yet much more common than mistaking the outline of hills, or a headland, is the mistaking of a light. All of them have carefully marked spaces of time, a flash for so many seconds, or a change of colour, or what not. But a man cannot always be bothered to time these things, and in a little boat under a strain he may not be able to do so. But the very commonest form of error in this, as in everything else, comes from an absolute and false certitude. You say to yourself, ‘There is no doubt at all that that light is such-and-such a light.’ You have been waiting to pick it up, and when you pick up a light you are certain it is that light, unless the timing of it is quite grossly different from what you expected. But you may be quite wildly wrong. I suppose no one will believe me when I tell them that I have known Saint Catherine’s mistaken for the Hogue.

But there are more absurd cases still. Many years ago, a ship called the Mohegan struck the rocks called the Manacles, which are inside Black Head, in Cornwall. She was going down the Channel, and there would seem to be no question of danger in the matter. The Lizard Light is there, staring plain enough; one only has to keep it well on the starboard bow going down-Channel, and one is sure to miss England. One cannot hit the Manacles so long as the light is well off one’s starboard bow, for they lie inside the Point. Therefore, when the Mohegan struck, she must have had the Lizard Light on her port bow, and the lookout man, and the man steering, and the man setting the course, and the man in command on the bridge must have known perfectly well (one would think) that the situation was impossible. Yet strike she did, and no one has ever really explained how it happened.

There are some of these mistakes which cannot be avoided, and which are explainable, not by any failure of the human reason, but by a very natural confusion between similar things. Thus, any one runs a risk at Dungeness on account of the two lighthouses there; I mean any one going up-Channel, and aiming at giving that point a very close shave.

Dungeness grows out to sea at a certain rate, so that, at long intervals, a new lighthouse has to be built to mark its extremity. Though it grows outwards thus into the Channel, the end is steep-to, and there is plenty of water right up alongside the land. Therefore, any one going up-Channel makes for the lighthouse direct, intending to pass within a few yards of the shore, for this shortens an up-Channel course. Also, if you have the tide with you, you have a strong stream there to help you.

Now, about one hundred years ago, they built the old lighthouse where Dungeness then was. That old lighthouse is now about one mile inland. It does happen, and I am witness to it with hundreds of others, that the modern lighthouse on the extreme end of the point may be obscured by day, when the old lighthouse is visible. In that case a man tends to steer for the old lighthouse, thinking it to be the new one, and he is aiming, of course, right on-shore when he thinks he is just going to miss the point.

The worst mistake of this sort I myself ever made was mistaking the Varne Buoy for the South Goodwin Lightship. It is not so impossible as it sounds. The weather was thick; I had been drifting for many hours without much wind, and with no certitude of where I was except that I was somewhere in the Straits. I looked up-weather, to the northeast, and saw in the brume what looked like a hull and a pole. I could not be quite certain whether there was a ball on the pole or not, but I certainly took it for a lightship; and, judging from the time that I had left the French harbour, and the sort of pace I thought I had made in my little boat, and tricked by the weather (which was much thicker than it looked), I made sure that this apparently distant object was the Goodwin. It was not till I came within a hail of it that I knew it for what it was—the Varne Buoy, not a hundredth the size of a lightship.

I suppose that the regularity and certitude of modern mechanical life on land tend to make men exaggerate the fixity of evidence. When men dealt more with the caprice of Nature, they were more ready to admit two things which modern men underestimate: the possibility of marvel and the fallibility of the senses.

Different periods take quite different standards in such affairs. Our own time prides itself on a specially clear vision of reality, and ridicules the credulity of the past. Yet I notice a hundred things in which I could imagine posterity stupefied at our inane credulity. We accept, in everything which does not immediately concern us, a bare newspaper statement made anonymously. We accept it as we accept the evidence of our own senses, or more; we accept it although it is unvouched for, unproved, untested. We accept it—to be brutal—because it is printed, and because it is printed on a large scale.

There is a whole mythology of ‘prehistory,’ which has grown up, mushroom-like, in less than a lifetime, which pretends to explain the unknown past of man, and which has already become more fixed and sacred to the multitude than any mythology accepted by our fathers. Not one of the millions who accept that mythology could give you even the briefest account of the supposed steps of evidence upon which it reposes. In this process the strange mechanical, universal, influence of what is called ‘popular education’ plays a very great part, and whereas the half-educated man was always a danger, to-day he is a catastrophe.

Or, take not prehistory—which is a mere imposture—but recent recorded real history. Millions of children are told that the American Colonies revolted because they were unjustly taxed by England; that after a long struggle they won, and that they won because they were right; because they had the same qualities as our own sacred selves, being of our own sacred blood; that the trouble ought never to have arisen, and was only due to the folly of a few misguided and pigheaded English gentlemen who happened then to hold political power. I will bargain that—above the labouring mass—this is the attitude taken by nine men out of ten in England to-day towards the American War of Independence. On the top of that all are told—or given the impression, at any rate—that England soon repented of her error, and came to regard the United States as the noblest of her children.

They are not told that an expensive war had been waged by the Mother Country in defence of the Colonies; that long and difficult negotiations had been undertaken to see how that expense could be shared; that certainly a majority of the colonists—and probably a large majority—were on the side of England, and against the rebels, and that the final defeat of England was mainly due to the intervention of the French, and especially to the more close concentration of the French fleet. They are not told that the English people regarded themselves as perfectly right, that they continued to detest the Americans with the most vivid hatred for a hundred years afterwards, or that the policy of pretending a friendship with America is quite recent, and only grew up after the strength of the new country was apparent, when the long agony of the Civil War had turned in favour of the North. Worst of all, they are not told that this pretence of identifying the United States with England is being carried on against increasing odds, as the United States becomes less and less English in tradition, in blood, in morals, and everything else.

The false legend is swallowed whole, and it is a very good example of how mythology can have a direct practical effect for ill. Our general opinion is only now beginning to be shocked by the foreignness of America, and is still bewildered by the refusal of Americans to regard themselves as English. You can always be certain of middle-class and lower middle-class support in England (I do not say popular support, for the populace are quite indifferent to the whole affair) for any foreign policy which takes for granted that America is but another England overseas.

I saw a very good example of this at the beginning of the last year, 1924, when I was watching opinion at home and abroad upon what were then called the ‘Expert Committees,’ and later, the ‘Dawes’—that is, the two committees sitting in Paris to decide whether the Germans had concealed large assets abroad, and also to decide what the Germans could pay by way of reparations.

For three solid years the international financial powers which directed our policy in the matter of German reparations had denied the accumulation of German wealth abroad, and had persistently clamoured that the Germans could never pay more than a small fraction of the sums claimed of them, if that. From the same sources there had been in England a persistent clamour for ‘expert’ examination of the question under American direction, and the basis of this last demand was the certitude that America would only act in the matter as the willing helpmate of England. The committees met, but the initiative for calling them together was American; the American delegates, and behind them the American Government, were the deciding forces. When the reports came out, there was a stupefaction, gallantly concealed; for those reports, insisted upon by the American delegates, completely contradicted in every point the propaganda of the past three years. They insisted that the Germans had accumulated vast sums abroad, especially in the United States, and that Germany could soon pay indefinitely, at the rate of £125,000,000 a year. The result of having nourished these illusions upon American relations to England was that the foreign policy adopted officially by the British Government was thrown out of gear. The English Governments (acting in this respect differently from the way in which the English public as a whole would have acted) had supported Germany to the fullest of their ability. They had postponed all efforts of reparations, they had insisted that all demands to obtain payments by force were illegal; they had refused to help their Allies to obtain such payments; their Treasury spokesman had told everybody that Germany had nothing concealed abroad to speak of, and certainly could not pay on any considerable scale. They then asked for a Committee of Experts, took it for granted that American pressure on this Committee would be in their favour, openly pledged themselves beforehand to accept the report, and were bewildered, when the report came out, to find it opposed to them.

Those who govern us have been compelled to accept the Dawes Report—even to set it working—and they watch anxiously its coming effect upon that balance whereby England lives. They are caught in a trap. Had they known a plain, modern historical truth, that America is a foreign country, they could have preserved an independent national policy. It is now too late. America has mastered us.

The next port from which I have taken the Nona after the turn of the land is Fowey, for, though I have gone into Mevagissey once in my life, it was but in an open boat, sailing across Saint Austell’s Bay; and there, in Mevagissey, I did not learn what I had always desired to learn, and what to this day remains a mystery to me, and that is, the history, nature, and fate of the busy little buzzer the Mevagissey Bee. It was in the port of Boston, in Lincolnshire, that I first heard of this animal, having then not yet arrived at my thirtieth year. Perhaps I had heard its name before, and had not noticed it; but it was there that I was first struck by the account of its strange demeanour.

There lay in the narrow river a very large, hideous, and dirty steamer, and I could not see how she would have room to turn, for she was pointing upstream, under the distant benediction of that marvellous great tower. I said to a sailorman who was leaning on a post, and looking moodily at this steamer (which may have been his ship for all I know): ‘How will she get out of this?’ To which he answered: ‘Starn foremost, like the Mevagissey Bee.’ I asked him what that Bee was, and by way of answer he lurched away. I have asked many men since, and no one has been able to tell me.

Fowey, then, I say, is the most western port to which, or from which, I ever took the Nona. And Fowey is a thing by itself. One may say of it what Mr. Barry Pain said in his review of that ought-to-be-most-famous book called ‘Delina Delaney’: ‘This is a thing which only happens once in a thousand years.’

Fowey is the harbour of harbours, and the last port town left without any admixture of the modern evil. It ought to be a kingdom of its own. In Fowey all is courtesy, and good reason for the chance sailing-man. For your provision, or your transport, or your mooring, you pay no more than you should, and whatever you may need in gear is to be had at once; and in Fowey have I had a sail made for me in, perhaps, one sixth of the time it would have taken anywhere else along the coast eastward. It was a jib, and it fitted. In Fowey, also, there is security from all winds, good holding-ground, and, what is best of all, an air in which all other places may be forgotten, and in which the cares of this crowded island melt away. I suppose when the crash comes, and the ruins have been more or less cleaned up, Fowey will remain to carry on the traditions of a better England. I hope so. There is no fault to be found with it. Now, can this be said of any other town except Leominster? I think not. I have never sailed into Fowey or out of Fowey without good luck attending me. I have never had to beat in or out of Fowey; I have always had a leading wind. I have had light airs, of course, outside, but I have never been becalmed. The last time I left that blessed land—to which, perhaps, I never shall return—it was under so gallant a northwest breeze, so clear a light in the first of the midday tide, that the career along the coast to Plymouth Sound was like a song.

It is unreasonable, but those stretches of coast-wise sea in which one has had good fortune remain in the mind exceptional, and carry with them a sort of false air of security, as though they were always so. Men must have had the terror of their lives time and again off that coast; but to me it always seems, when it returns as a picture in my mind, sunlit, and framed in vigorous small seas, with the attendance of a noble and a sufficient breeze. With what pleasure have I not noted the speed she made as she passed the measured mile by Polperro, and how pleasant to see Rame Head growing perpetually before one, until the Nona opened the majestic breadth of Plymouth Sound.

As for Plymouth, I fear there is some evil of perversion about that mood which makes so many men (and I am one of them) disgruntled with exaggerated fame. Modern legend has got a way of selecting a few abiding places of its own, and there trampling down the grass and all around with such a multitude of repetition and exaggeration and ready-made phrase as corresponds, in the things of the mind, to the most intolerable mud in the things of the soil. Is it print which has done this, and steam—newspapers and the railway? No! So much evil could not have come from material things: its real source was in the degraded modern mind. What with Drake and the Armada, and the Bowls, and the Rock upon the other side of the sea which failed to land upon the Puritans, and the perpetual reiteration of all these things, I would rather see Plymouth breakwater from the Sound, and so sail past, than look on the Sound from the Hoe. But I admit that this mood is evil, and that it is something of a perversion to feel such irritation against mere wearisome repetitions. One has only to leave them alone.

It is a heavenly piece of coast, all this southern bulge of Devon, with its little secret rivers and untainted towns. The people are good and the land. So, with reservations, is its sea even beyond the Sound. Though once, indeed, I did suffer off Bolt Head one of the two most abominable spills of wind I ever suffered—and the first was off Beachy Head by Birdling Gap on Whit-Tuesday, 1902, a day ever to be remembered.

For the air fell off Birdling Gap just like water out of a bucket, and nearly blew the Nona flat upon her beam. I let go the sheet with a run, but as it was she dipped, perhaps, a third of her mainsail, and nearly broke her lover’s heart with fear. It is so sometimes with these high lands. The wind does not run true. It blows over them, and curls through a depression upon their edges, and curves, splashing down solid, in a bolt, on to the deep below. For, on that day by Beachy, all those years ago, the true wind was but just enough northerly to let me keep a course for Newhaven, hauled very close and saving every inch. But that gust came suddenly right on the weather beam, from far east of north, and nearly settled my then young craft and him that cherished and still cherishes her.

As for the spill off Bolt Head, it fell after a clear midnight, since the War, and it was more than a spill; for it blew steadily for the best part of an hour and then ceased. But, like its younger brother off Beachy, it was peculiar to the high land; for it came due northerly, whereas the main wind had east in it. I was watching the morning star burning like a sacred furnace on the edges of the black hills when Satan sent that wind and tried to drown three men. But we reefed in time—there were three of us, one for the helm and two to the reef; and when dawn broke, and the blessed colours of the east renewed the day, strange!—one end of the boom had three reefs down, and the other only two!

A coast of good memories: may it stand for ever in spite of petrol and every other evil thing. There might be no London at all, so kindly and so well guarded are all the men and women of its little harbour towns, and so uncrowded its hills. The Erne and the Avon I have never entered, but the Yealm I know: a difficult river in which to anchor, on account of innumerable moorings, a winding water in a wooded gorge, difficult also for wind. And Salcombe I have sailed in and out of—I suppose the happiest harbour in the world. It has many little beaches of its own, the homes of men standing separate upon them, far inland creeks, not too strong a tide, a bar somewhat shoal but always deep enough for the Nona, and a clear fairway to be fetched from within and from without, I take it, upon any wind; for the harbour opens well inside the narrows, and the seaward shores open well outside them.

Upon this piece of coast, setting out once from Plymouth, there came to me an experience of no particular moment as history, but of powerful effect upon my mind. It marked, in a sort of mysterious omen way, or, perhaps, I should say in a sort of visionary way, the unleashing of the Great War.

It so happened that in that summer of 1914 I had had occasion to go from Hampshire to one of the western ports, where I was to pick up my boat, and take her ultimately into Plymouth Sound, and thence, when I should have the leisure, I proposed to take her out again, and stand eastward up the coast.

I was staying in Hampshire with a friend who had a house in the New Forest. It was on a Sunday I set out thence. He sent me in his motor to Salisbury, where I wished to get Mass before going on by train. During the Mass, the priest, after his announcements, asked the congregation to pray for the soul of the Archduke heir-apparent of Austria, who had been murdered at a place called Sarajevo. I had never heard the name, and I had but a vague idea of who this archduke was, of his relationship to the Emperor, and of his heirship to the throne of Hapsburg-Lorraine. I came to the Nona, where she lay, and sailed out with her into the sea for some days. I had no conception that anything could be brewing.

When I came to land again, and went up to London, I found the air to be filled with all the possibilities of that time. The Austrian Government had sent to the Servian Government a note, the like of which had not been heard in the history of Christendom. It made demands which no government claiming to sovereignty could accept. For my part, when I read the terms of the note, I was in no doubt that it was of Prussian dictation. I am in no doubt to this day that it was of Prussian dictation.

There are two ways of ascertaining the origin of such a thing. One is the material way, the consultation of the only available documents, and the only certified direct human evidence. The other is the moral way, when one says: ‘This can only have been written by So-and-So, or, at the very least, can only have been inspired by So-and-So.’ Thus, if I find upon the table of a doubtful, weak kind of a man—and a courteous one at that—a letter framed in the very terms and manner of a bully, constantly his associate, then, though the letter be in the handwriting of the former, and on his own paper, even if there were convincing proof that when the actual writing was done the man was alone, I should yet say that the real author was the bully, and not the gentleman. He may have learnt it by heart at dictation. He may have copied it from the other’s draft. At any rate, it is morally certain that the one man, and not the other, is the true author of the thing launched—is the one responsible.

Now, in the case of this note to Servia, the whole thing is Prussian from beginning to end: the extreme arrogance, the deliberate provocation, the exactitude, the aridity, and, above all, the unintelligence. And as for proof upon the other side, we have none, except what the various culprits chose themselves to give us.

As I went about London getting all men’s views, as is my custom when grave things threaten, I heard many judgments passed upon the probable consequences of the note. The man whose judgment in European affairs I trusted most, one who had been largely employed in the foreign business of this country, and who also had a deep and solid knowledge of history, told me that there would not be war, even between Austria and Servia, let alone an extension of the peril.

The reason he gave for this was curious. He said that a document of that extreme violence would not have been issued if war were the object. The object was to make bargaining acutely necessary, and to get a further hold over Balkan land as a result of a long haggling. For very violent actions—of which this was the most extreme case yet known to Europe—the excess of offensive and inhuman brutality could only, he said, be used as a blind.

Though I then knew very much less of the European situation, I hesitated to agree with him as to the motive; but, on the other hand, I certainly did not think there would be war. I thought Servia would yield in all save the very worst and most humiliating points, and that these would at last be waived.

Many other opinions of various colours did I gather in that interval, but only one foreseeing a war; and to that one I paid no attention, because it was very foolishly expressed, and for the wrong reason. It was given me by a man who had travelled widely, and who was an expert in many languages, as well as a man of great knowledge in certain forms of mechanical construction. He had also a high scientific training. He had no public post. This man said to me there would be war, because Austria was known to be in a rotten condition, because upon the outbreak of war the various sections of her tessellated dominion would break apart, and the Servians, knowing this, and having the Russians behind them, would take up the challenge. The Prussian power, or ‘Reich,’ would be so alarmed at the prospect that it would attempt to stave off hostilities, or, failing that, to leave the Austrian Crown to its fate. Such was the folly and ill-judgment of the only man who thought that war was coming, among all those whom I consulted. It was a good example of hitting a mark by firing wide: like the duellist in the dark room who in mercy shot up the chimney, yet brought down his opponent.

For note you that though a great many men up and down Europe had said that Prussia was making for war, and that a conflict must come about in some near future, and though I myself had written it over my own signature (if I remember rightly), when, in 1911, Prussia raised her special war tax, and the French were compelled to reintroduce the three years’ service; yet this did not seem to be the occasion—for it was too abrupt. There seemed to be no plot or plan; and the season was already late.

I did not know what we know now, that Prussia firmly calculated on two things: first, the neutrality of England, and, secondly, a very complete and very rapid victory over the French, a decisive victory, destroying the whole of the French army within a month of the frontier crossing; a battle beginning as did Charleroi, but ending very differently from the Marne.

When I next had occasion to leave London, in order to find again my boat at Plymouth, and to take her out, nothing was decided. One might almost say that the suspense, such as it was, seemed less burdensome, and the sense of peril less acute. I came down by night; I saw no morning papers; I got aboard with my companion, and spent the whole forenoon before the slight tide would serve in putting things to right for the cruise.

We dropped out under a soft air, which soon died away. We spent the whole mortal day drifting down to the Mewstone, and then, in that exasperating calm, the turn of the tide took us up again towards the breakwater. It was not till the fall of day that a breeze arose; I cannot remember from what quarter, but I think it was off the land—that is, from the northeast—but, at any rate, it served us; we could go eastward without having to beat, and we made out down the Sound. It was still light when we passed the Mewstone again. Through the last of evening and through all the darkness we ran along the coast to Devon for the Start.

I knew that the times were perilous, but I knew no more than any other man, in that odd week’s lull before the storm, exactly how perilous they were. It was nearly a month, I think, since I had heard the priest read out, from those altar steps of Salisbury, prayers for the Archduke who had been murdered at Sarajevo.

When I had set out from Plymouth there was nothing but rumour, nothing certain. The Fleet had dispersed already some days past from the great review at Spithead, and was, as we were told, in the Atlantic at manœuvres. A night, a day, and now another night had passed; I had heard no news.

Nothing was further from my mind than war and armament as the sun rose on that glorious July morning, right out of a clean horizon, towards which the wind blew fresh and cool. It was a light but steady wind of morning that filled my sails as I sat at the tiller with a blanket about me, and laying her head to the north.

We had just rounded the Start at dawn. My companion went below to sleep. I watched, over the quarter, the Start Light flashing pale and white in the broadening day, and at last extinguished. Then the sun rose, as I have said. Immediately after its rising a sort of light haze filled the air to eastward. It was denser than it seemed to be, for it did not obscure the low disc of the sun, nor redden it, but, as you will read in a moment, it performed a mystery. The little ship slipped on, up past the Skerries Bank, and I could see far off the headland which bounds Dart Bay. There was no sail in sight. I was alone upon the sea; and the breeze, neither freshening nor lowering, but giving a hearty line of course (along which we slipped, perhaps, five knots or six), made the water speak merrily upon the bows and along the run of our low sides. In this loneliness and content, as I sailed northward, I chanced to look, after an hour’s steering or so, eastward again towards the open sea—and then it was that there passed me the vision I shall remember forever, or for so long as the longest life may last.

Like ghosts, like things themselves made of mist, there passed between me and the newly risen sun a procession of great forms, all in line, hastening eastward. It was the Fleet recalled.

The slight haze along that distant water had thickened, perhaps, imperceptibly; or perhaps the great speed of the men-of-war buried them too quickly in the distance. But, from whatever cause, this marvel was of short duration. It was seen for a moment, and in a moment it was gone.

Then I knew that war would come, and my mind was changed.

The bright air was the same around me and the heartening morning wind, the happy course of the Nona, making for a known port with all in her favour and something of youth in her and all round. What that war would bring, its magnitude, its character, was veiled from us all; but the advent of it, the mass of it coming, put a new face on everything I saw and felt and heard; on the steady breeze, on the little lapping of the salt sea-water, on the strong headlands of England. So went I northward alone as the day grew, until by mid-morning, the breeze having dropped somewhat and the boat running more sluggishly, we lay abeam of the rock called the Druid’s Mare, and began to run up the coast for Torbay. My companion wakened and came on deck. I told him what I had seen.

These strong emotions, though they colour all the mind, soon lose their edge, and we fell to talking of the coast we passed, and of the chance of holding the wind, which declined a little and was not so steady as we rounded the last headland. My mind turned nothing over of the possibilities of what was to come. It was later, when I had come ashore again, and had reached London, that I learnt of the prolonged hesitation among the politicians, men by their petty trade unused to and unfit for tasks of magnitude; of the French President’s letter and the ambiguous reply to it, drafted and published; of the final voting when, by a majority of one, the Cabinet decided upon war. Had the virility of such a decision been known even four brief days earlier, war would not have come. But it was too late.

Among the nine who gave their votes in favour of the neutrality of Britain, some were actuated, as we know, by base, one, as we know too well, by the basest of motives: mere trivial personal ambition for success in the wretched tawdry game of professional politics, which was the only craft he knew. But some also acted from the noblest motives and rise for the moment above the fetid marsh-mist of Westminster. These I shall always respect for the strength of their wills and the clarity of their convictions in so awful a moment.

Still more did I then, and do I still, respect them for the deliberate choice they made to accept what was certain to be a vivid, and might be a very dangerous unpopularity, when the first shots should be fired. These men were convinced that it would be to the advantage of their country if the Continental forces should be left to thrash out their own decisions. They were opposed, perhaps, to the majority of their countrymen at the time (it is not so sure; for the mass of their countrymen had hardly had time to decide, so swift was the last rush of events). They would certainly be opposed, as they knew, to the vast majority of their countrymen in a few days. They were the more English, the more characteristic of the blood which they boasted, in that they took such a decision fearlessly. I can believe that to this day the best of them still thinks that his judgment was sound and that great evils now passed, and other evils dreadfully threatening us now, more than ten years after, would have been saved us altogether, if England had refused war. But the best-instructed opinion, the opinion with the widest view, was opposed to them. War followed; with what full fruits only men now young can live to discover.

There is not perhaps in all history (of the sort which has full records behind it) any group of days on which men will debate more and will find it less easy to establish a permanent conclusion than those last days of July and first days of August, 1914. But there are certain structural lines supporting even the most confused and the most debated of records. Thus, men will never be exactly certain what Harold did at the Court of William, nor of how the first directive events of that great quarrel lay. Men will never arrive at a fixed and general conclusion upon the initiative responsible for the revolutionary wars, nor even, perhaps, for the renewed attack upon Napoleon, or by Napoleon, after Elba. But these debates are, for all that, built round a solid skeleton of certain conclusions, and in this great matter of the Great War I do not think that posterity will depart from the general conclusion of our own times (which is certainly mine) that an early declaration of the British attitude would have prevented war.

It is a question easily confused with a totally different one, and the two must be kept carefully apart. The right of Great Britain to remain neutral should surely be admitted, not only in law but in common sense. In law there was no definite agreement with the French. There was no accepted obligation to support the French in the West or elsewhere. A great number of acts had been accomplished which could have had only such a support for their object; the military situation had been studied, contingent military dispositions had been carefully planned in detail. The general policy of the preceding years, especially after Agadir, had pointed to the same end; but the Government of this country had always, in the most insistent manner, affirmed and provided for its freedom of choice when the crisis should come. And the very fact that it had thus so continuously maintained that freedom of choice, and specifically asserted it, is proof that every other step, however obviously designed for common action in arms, was not to be given the interpretation of a binding alliance.