“When Britain first at Heaven's command
                                                                                        Arose from out the azure main …”,
          [= the opening lines of Britain’s semi-official national anthem “Rule Britannia”, only  for your information, W.E.P.]
her guardian angels did not content themselves with merely singing a strain or so to celebrate the occasion. They took practical measures — or at any rate they perpetrated two practical jokes — whereby they ensured that Britain and her inhabitants should remain a sort of standing practical joke to the end of time. Everybody — even the British themselves — must have noticed the effect produced by this country upon the more staid and serious peoples of the European continent — and, indeed, of any continent: it is precisely that mixture of startled recoil, affronted dignity, nervous irritation, reluctant amusement, and apprehension about what is going to happen next which characterizes the person who has walked through a harmless-looking door and received a bucket of water on his head. There is something about the British which is felt to be unwelcoming, freakish and irresponsible; they are solemn on the outside and frivolous at heart, and behind their most decorous appearances there lurks a schoolboy grin; they are not unsuccessful in statesmanship, trade, or warfare, yet about their politics, economics and military organisation there is always an air of improvisation, as though they did not take the future seriously; above all, you never know where to have them, they do not fit handily into any pigeonhole.

When Neptune shouldered Britain out of the sea, he did make a neat engineering job of it. Characteristically, Britain came up with one edge thick and hard and the other soft and thin like a slice of wedding-cake. The guardian angels, observing that her more vulnerable side was precisely that which lay nearer to Europe and was consequently the more open to attack, did their best to square matters up. They arranged that the 22 miles separating the Kentish coast from the mainland should be filled with a stretch of water so disagreeable that, without very weighty reasons indeed, nobody in his senses would have any stomach for crossing it. So far, so good; a sensible, but dull precaution. If nobody even attempted to cross the Narrow Seas, where would be the fun? The island must be made desirable — then indeed the joke of making it so near yet inaccessible would acquire a rich flavour. With coal and iron it was already well stocked; but make it also fertile, and there it would hang, a veritable fruit of Tantalus, bobbing at the mouth of hungry adventurers. The latitude in which the place stood was unfavourable; but the celestial resources were not exhausted. The guardian angels, with a chuckle, turned on the hot-water tap off the distant shores of Panama and released the Gulf Stream into the English Channel. By those two geographical jokes — the Gulf Stream and the Channel — everything that appears remarkable in the temperament and history of the British can be sensibly and satisfactorily accounted for.