The other affects London more especially, but through London it influences the rest of the country to a certain extent.

You will see around you here much that will strike you as indications of heartless indifference to the calamity that has befallen our nation.

Well, you must remember that many things in modern life, especially in the big cities, are not national but international.
In the world of music and art and the drama, for instance, the foreign names are legion, they confront you at every turn, and some of our British devotees of such arts are more acclimatised to the ways of Munich or Moscow than they are familiar with the life, say, of Stirling or York.
For years they have lived and thought and spoken in an atmosphere and jargon of denationalised culture--even those of them who have never left our shores.

They would take pains to be intimately familiar with the domestic affairs and views of life of some Galician gipsy dramatist, and gravely quote and discuss his opinions on debts and mistresses and cookery, while they would shudder at 'D'ye ken John Peel ?' as a piece of uncouth barbarity.

You cannot expect a world of that sort to be permanently concerned or downcast because the Crown of Charlemagne takes its place now on the top of the Royal box in the theatres, or at the head of programmes at State concerts.