Already that one great blank in our land had made snobbishness the only religion of South England; and turned rich men into a mythology.

The effect can be well summed up in that decorous abbreviation by which our rustics speak of "Lady's Bedstraw," where they once spoke of "Our Lady's Bedstraw." We have dropped the comparatively democratic adjective, and kept the aristocratic noun.

South England is still, as it was called in the Middle Ages, a garden; but it is the kind where grow the plants called "lords and ladies." We became more and more insular even about our continental conquests; we stood upon our island as if on an anchored ship.

We never thought of Nelson at Naples, but only eternally at Trafalgar; and even that Spanish name we managed to pronounce wrong.

But even if we regard the first attack upon Napoleon as a national necessity, the general trend remains true.