And so my friend and I walk side by side along the ways of the world, he being full of a rich and humane sentiment, because he remembers passing that way a few hundred times since his childhood; while to me existence is a perpetual fairy-tale, because I have forgotten all about it.

The lamp-post which moves him to a tear of reminiscence wrings from me a cry of astonishment; and the wall which to him is as historic as a pyramid is to me as arresting and revolutionary as a barricade.

Now in this, I am glad to say, my temperament is very English; and the difference is very typical of the two functions of the English and the French.
But in practical politics the French have a certain advantage in knowing where they are, and knowing it is where they have been before.
It is in the Roman Empire.
The position of the English in Egypt or even in Palestine is something of a paradox.

The real English claim is never heard in England and never uttered by Englishmen.

We do indeed hear a number of false English claims, and other English claims that are rather irrelevant than false.
We hear pompous and hypocritical suggestions, full of that which so often accompanies the sin of pride, the weakness of provinciality.
We hear suggestions that the English alone can establish anywhere a reign of law, justice, mercy, purity and all the rest of it.
We also hear franker and fairer suggestions that the English have after all (as indeed they have) embarked on a spirited and stirring adventure; and that there has been a real romance in the extending of the British Empire in strange lands.
But the real case for these semi-eastern occupations is not that of extending the British Empire in strange lands.
Rather it is restoring the Roman Empire in familiar lands.
It is not merely breaking out of Europe in the search for something non-European.