And of course individual Englishmen abroad feel it. You rarely meet an Englishman far from home, but he is burning with impatience, disgust, and even contempt, of home. Home seems a shoddy place. And when you get here, it’s even shoddier than it seems from afar.

If, abroad, you meet an Englishman in office, he is speechless, almost cynical with rage. “What can I do!” he says. “What can I do, against the orders from home. I get orders that I must give no loop-hole for offence against America. All I have to do is to guard against giving offence, above all to America. I must be on my knees all the time, in front of America, begging her not to take offence, when she hasn’t the faintest intention even of taking offence. ”

This is from a man who has lived out in the world, and who knows that the moment you go down on your knees to a man, he spits on you: and quite right too. Men have no business on their knees.

“I have an Englishman wants to go into the United States. Washington has given him a visa, and said: Yes, you can enter whenever you like. Comes a cable from London: Prevent this man from crossing into the United States, Washington might not like it. What can one do·”

The same story everywhere. A man is building a railway with nigger labour. Some insolent Jamaica nigger—British Subject, larger than life—brings a charge against his boss. Solemn trial by the British, influence from the government, the Englishman is reprimanded, the nigger smiles and spits in his face.

Long live the bottom dog! May he devour us all.

Same story from India, from Egypt, from China. At home, a lot of queer, inane, half-female-seeming men, not quite men at all, and certainly not women. The women would be far braver—Then abroad, a few Englishmen still struggling.