Yon Sir Erchibald has poor notions o’ strawtegy. - John Buchan

We are all, even the best of us, egoists and self-deceivers, and without a little comfortable make-believe to clothe us we should freeze in the outer winds.

What do we mean by spiritual development? Surely, the broadening and deepening of the mind till it regards the world in its true perspective, and the strengthening of the character so that the will is a tempered and unerring weapon in the charge of a man's soul. And this end is to be achieved only by the exercise of the mind upon the largest possible manifold of experience, and by the conflict of character with the alien forces of the world.

If his "magna imago" could return to earth, he would be puzzled at some of our experiments in empire, and might well complain that the imperfections of his work were taken as its virtues, and that so many truths had gone silently out of mind. He had prided himself on having given the world peace, and he would be amazed by the loud praise of war as a natural and wholesome concomitant of a nation's life. Wars he had fought from an anxious desire to safeguard his people, as the shepherd builds the defences of his sheepfold; but he hated the thing, because he knew well the deadly "disordering," which the Greek historian noted as the consequence of the most triumphant campaign. He would marvel, too, at the current talk of racial purity, the exaltation of one breed of men as the chosen favourites of the gods. That would seem to him not only a defiance of the new Christian creed, but of the Stoicism which he had sincerely professed.