"D'you still do that?" I asked.
"In the same old way. All through the war, everything I could get hold of in the Public Library. It's instructive reading, George. They—simply—hate—us—abroad; and they aren't as much scared of us as they used to be. We've made an everlasting show of our weakness, and we had a close call of being attacked while our hands were full."
"Who wants to attack us?" I asked.
"Anyone with anything to gain. France, as long as we hold Egypt; Russia, as long as we hold India; Germany, as long as we threaten the trade of the world with our fleet. 'Well, it's all over now.' When I hear people talking like that.... You dam' British don't deserve to survive."
He ground the glowing end of his cigar into the loose gravel with a savage twist of his heel.
"Come off the stump, Raney," I said. "Anyone can make a damn-you-all-round speech. What d'you want done?"
"Ten years' organization of our British Empire," he answered. "If we mustered our full resources, we could snap our fingers at any other power."
My political convictions exist to be discarded, and before the war had been six months in progress I had ceased to call myself a pro-Boer; a year or two later I was an impenitent Liberal Leaguer. In my progress from one pole to the other I lived in philosophic doubt tempered by profound distrust of the word 'Imperialism' and the vision of Rand Jews which it conjured up.
"Hang it, we've only just finished one war," I said. "I don't want another."
"You can have an organized empire and a competent army without going to war."