ABSTRACT
The reflections gathered together in this book have not been prompted by an innocent desire to proclaim a political creed. Would it not have been a strange impertinence to assert that Julius Caesar should behave like Coriolanus or Hamlet like Henry the Fifth, either on the stage or in the world? Even less should I venture to prophesy the course of history in the future. What wiseacre in the nineteenth century could have considered possible the things we have seen in the twentieth?
