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They do not believe that there is an ethical side to this war. The Germans are pitifully dense to ethical values. They are not idealists or sentimentalists, and their imagination is not easily kindled. Added to this, they have separated themselves from religion.
Bastian Cautley was right. You may go on building as high as you please, but you will never alter the original ground-plan of human nature. And how she had scoffed at his "man's view"; how indignantly she had repulsed his suggestion that there was a side to the subject that her friends the idealists were much too ideal to see.
There was no magic of poesy here or of art; but the glamour of their imagination turned yellow calico into cloth of gold and the megaphones into the silver trumpets of joy's heralds. Almost humbled, Blinker rolled up the shirt sleeves of his mind and joined the idealists. "You are the lady doctor," he said to Florence.
Like Scott, he belonged to the idealists, and not to the realists, whom our generation affects. Both writers stimulate the longing for something better. Their creed was short: "Love God and honor the King." It is a very good one for a literary man, and might do for a Christian.
Shame was cast aside like a mask, all delicacy of feeling was dispensed with, every illusion of the "high origin" of man destroyed; to come into such close contact with nothing but the beast in man had been too much for him, for he had been brought up by idealists.
They were not content to despise they regarded the gentle dotards of the preceding generation, the visionary idealists, the humanitarian thinkers of the preceding generation, as public malefactors. Emmanuel was among them in the eyes of the young men. He suffered cruelly and was very angry.
I have been to see him, and we agreed it was the only thing to do. 'Oh, Grey, exclaimed the squire, with a movement of impatience. 'Grey of course wanted you to set up a church of your own, or to join his! He is like all idealists, he has the usual foolish contempt for the compromise of institutions.
It is mine, it is yours, it is nothing trash. Any one with a brain-pan under his hat will recognise inside of half an hour that we are anything but a nation of shopkeepers spiritually. It is as plain as a pike-staff that we are a nation of perfectly rabid idealists.
It enables them to retain faith in their ideals, and at the same time to hold on to their intellectual self-respect. There are idealists of another sort who know nothing of their struggles and self-contradictions. Having formed their ideal of what ought to be, they identify it with what is. For them belief in the existence of good is equivalent to the obliteration of evil.
They were striking to get the pay and hours they wanted out of the Government, and, of course, for nationalisation. They were not idealists, and not Bolshevists, but frank grabbers, like most of us. But, as every one will remember, 'Bolshevist' had become at this period a vague term of abuse, like 'Hun' during the war.
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