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This seeming obliviousness to harsh facts, this innate confidence, is one of the most arresting features of the national character. We will encounter it often in this book as we seek answers to the questions about Britain's future.

Consideration of Britain in the world today, and especially of her relation to the United States and to the Soviet Union, must take into account the historical fact that the country's present situation is not altogether novel to Britons.

For Americans it is unusual, and hence disturbing, to live in the same world with a hostile state—the Soviet Union—that is larger and more populous than their own country. Enmity has burst upon us suddenly in the past. We have been told by generations of immigrants that the whole world loved and admired us. It has taken Americans some time to make the psychological adjustment to the position of world power.

The British situation is different. The British have always been inferior in strength of numbers to their great antagonists: the Spain of Philip II, the France of Louis XIV and Napoleon, the Germany of Wilhelm II and Hitler, and, today, the Soviet Union. British power has rested not upon numbers but upon combinations of economic stability, political maneuvering, and the exercise of sea, land, and, latterly, air power. The world abroad has always appeared harsh to the Briton. Except for the second half of the last century—a small period in a thousand years of national existence—the British have always seen on the horizon the threat of a larger, more powerful neighbor. The balance has been restored in many a crisis by the ability first of the English and then of the British to attain in war a unity of purpose and energy which in the end has brought victory.