Then suddenly Nature takes her
revenge. She strikes at the city with a pestilence and at the
hospital with an epidemic of hospital gangrene, slaughtering
right and left until the innocent young have paid for the guilty
old, and the account is balanced. And then she goes to sleep
again and gives another period of credit, with the same result.
This is what has just happened in our political hygiene.
Political science has been as recklessly neglected by Governments
and electorates during my lifetime as sanitary science was in the
days of Charles the Second. In international relations diplomacy
has been a boyishly lawless affair of family intrigues,
commercial and territorial brigandage, torpors of
pseudo-goodnature produced by laziness and spasms of ferocious
activity produced by terror. But in these islands we muddled
through. Nature gave us a longer credit than she gave to France
or Germany or Russia. To British centenarians who died in their
beds in 1914, any dread of having to hide underground in London
from the shells of an enemy seemed more remote and fantastic than
a dread of the appearance of a colony of cobras and rattlesnakes
in Kensington Gardens. In the prophetic works of Charles Dickens
we were warned against many evils which have since come to pass;
but of the evil of being slaughtered by a foreign foe on our own
doorsteps there was no shadow.
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