To any other nation, sport, no matter how intimate a part of the national life, in certain emergencies becomes trivial. To say that to an Englishman would be equivalent to saying that under any circumstances childbirth or prayer could be trivial. It is a national characteristic which must simply be accepted.
The impression made on superficial observers by these manners and habits of casual unconcern does England a certain injustice. For as far as her duties to her allies are concerned she has undoubtedly gone far beyond her obligations.
As one of her Cabinet members (a man who may well be her next Prime Minister) put it to me:
"The best two ways that I know of to prove one's devotion to a cause are to pay for it and to die for it. England is voluntarily doing both in far greater measure than her commitments call for. When the war started she agreed to help France on land with an army of 150,000 men. She has now raised an army of 3,000,000 men.
"When the war started she agreed to assume the naval responsibility of protecting the coast of France. She has not only done that, and incidentally driven Germany from the seas, but she has thrown her ships into the attack on the Dardanelles and has helped Russia with her submarines in the Baltic.
"When the war started there was a financial understanding between England and France. England has not only carried out her share in this understanding, but has been instrumental in the financing of Italy, and stands ready to assume further similar responsibilities in the Balkans.
"How any candid mind in the face of such a record can charge Great Britain with shirking her share in the war passes my understanding."
There is no doubt about the truth of this. To get the voluntary gift of three million lives within one year, to get the voluntary loan of £600,000,000 in less than one month is probably an unparalleled achievement. Great Britain has done far more than her duty to others called for. And yet the question will not be smothered: Is she doing all that is called for by a strong, far-seeing nation's duty to itself?
She has thrown into the scales all the peculiar assets of a democracy in spontaneous zeal and voluntary sacrifice. But can a really great nation in such a crisis as this afford to be the recipient of only those contributions, no matter how prodigal, which are spontaneous and voluntary? Can a really proud nation afford to base its career at such a time upon the charity of its citizens? With Russia on the one hand purging herself of the bureaucratic evils of absolutism and forcing upon herself the pains of democratization, with France, on the other hand, sacrificing for the time her most cherished principles of republicanism in order to substitute the efficiency of Authority for the waste motions of Democracy, can England afford to remain complacently convinced that she represents the happy mean between these two extremes—a mean which needs no modifying?