Successful as that resistance has been, it has
piled up a sort of National Debt that is not the less oppressive
because we have no figures for it and do not intend to pay it. A
blockade that cuts off "the grace of our Lord" is in the long run
less bearable than the blockades which merely cut off raw
materials; and against that blockade our Armada is impotent. In
the blockader's house, he has assured us, there are many
mansions; but I am afraid they do not include either Heartbreak
House or Horseback Hall.
Plague on Both your Houses!
Meanwhile the Bolshevist picks and petards are at work on the
foundations of both buildings; and though the Bolshevists may be
buried in the ruins, their deaths will not save the edifices.
Unfortunately they can be built again. Like Doubting Castle, they
have been demolished many times by successive Greathearts, and
rebuilt by Simple, Sloth, and Presumption, by Feeble Mind and
Much Afraid, and by all the jurymen of Vanity Fair. Another
generation of "secondary education" at our ancient public schools
and the cheaper institutions that ape them will be quite
sufficient to keep the two going until the next war. For the
instruction of that generation I leave these pages as a record of
what civilian life was during the war: a matter on which history
is usually silent.
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