cruelly mauled by L'Homme Enchaîne, was obliged to offer the old man of 77 the Premiership, I wrote:

'Monsieur Clemenceau already loved his country with the ardent longing, the stormy jealousy of the wooer who is never quite satisfied, when he looked no older than he does in Manet's portrait. And he will certainly strain every pulse, every nerve, every fibre of his will, in the attempt to show to-morrow, at last, before the eyes of all the world, how he can rise to the greatness to which he has always felt himself equal. France will not be the same after him as it was before. He is capable of gaining great things for his country, capable also of running it into gigantic losses.'

Greater things than he ever dared to dream has he gained. He secured the unity of command, gave it to General Foch, breathed strong confidence into the war-weary nation, army, citizens, and was for the space of twelve moons all in all. Of the men who protested in Bordeaux against the incorporation of Alsace-Lorraine in the German Empire he is the sole survivor, and today he brings back to his country the lost provinces. After a victory which towers far above all hopes, he, who had never seemed to believe rightly in reconciliation, in a League of Nations, in a new world, has not shrunk from confessing his faith in worthier Reason. In November, 1917, he said:

'Only nations who are capable of freeing themselves can found the League of Nations. It is said in this House that Germany herself will break Prussian militarism. Unhappily, instead of breaking it, Germany makes herself its tool. If we win, we shall not be blinded by arrogance. We know the dangers of victory, how easily it leads to an abuse of strength. I am not of such a school; I stick to right. In this

respect I have always been true to myself. We want our rights, and we have been compelled to assert them by force.'

On the 18th of October, the day which freed Bruges, Douai, Lille, Ostend, Roubaix and Tourcoing, he said: 'We have fought for our rights, not for the opportunity to take vengeance. From the liberation of France must arise the liberation of mankind.' After the signature of the armistice: 'Exhausted Germany had to capitulate; its internal condition was such as to leave no hope of recovery. We must speedily come to its help. Because we have waged war in defense of humanity, not against it.'

This man, ennobled by his experience of good fortune, would certainly, now after the death of militarism, be ready to further in the radiance of victory that plan of disarmament, in which King Edward found a consolation of old age, and Mr. Lloyd George a pillar of hope for financial and social reform.

This younger Celt, too, peruse him at close quarters, does not give you the impression of a man for whom the fight which breaks his opponent's ribs is the supreme pleasure. After the death of his parents, who had migrated from Wales to Manchester, he was brought up among Methodists of Kymric speech, well outside the range of England's State Church, in the Welsh county of Carnarvon, which still to-day gives him his seat in the Lower House. He it was who carried the laws which secure the workingman against the ills of age, sickness, and unemployment, and who forced the Upper House to pass the People's Budget, the true stuff of Democracy, which he explained. in a speech of almost five hours. It went through although it left industry and the people's food unburdened, and only

taxed property, income, and luxuries (among which, it is true, he counted tea). He was always a pacifist, not far removed from the Socialists those of the sober-minded English brandand up to the day of Agadir he was wont to speak of Germany whose system of old-age insurance he had copied, minus the workingman's compulsory contributions in a tone of the greatest respect. This was not even impaired by his belief that the ordinary German lived on horseflesh and nasty black bread. In every position, as President of the Board of Trade, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Minister for Munitions, Premier, he has stood high above neighbors and predecessors. The well-informed could foresee that Great Britain would not withdraw its favor at the polls from its favorite, the man of vivid temperament, who created its apparatus of war. No one could anywhere be found who loves his homeland as this man does.

'We were never more richly blessed with prosperity than in years after we resolved to care for the poor and the weak. Twelve months ago five mighty countries, Germany, France, Russia, the United States, and our own United Kingdom, groaned under a deficit. England alone has now recovered and is paying for its shipbuilding and covering other expenditure besides from its current annual revenues. What other country on earth can boast of such success? Our country, which some endeavor to intimidate by a well-organized despondency, still offers capital the safest investment.'

That is David Lloyd George, 'Practical Idealist.' The man who wants to make the poorest a strong member in the body of the State, who is saddened when he sees in the Welsh mountains a stream rushing impetuously over a precipice and then, in the valley,

turning some worn and rusty millwheel, but never serving to bring light into the dark hovels of the poor.

Such a stream, Mr. Premier, would be a fit parable of the German people, were the will, which you are supposed in this country to embody, to become the law of the world. All too long it has been just like such a stream. No one, save a man blinded with rage, can deny that the performance of this people during the war has been marvelous. Enthusiasm for a duty, devotion to a duty whose fulfillment was represented as necessary for the Fatherland, quiet accommodation to the hardships of privation, joy in selfsacrifice there was a grandeur in this storm of will-power! And it is no vain self-admiration which prompts the question whether any other among the peoples softened by civilization would have carried for so long a stretch the dreary daily burden of such misery. Shameful, therefore despicable, calumny, is the talk which taxes the home country with having rotted and poisoned the army at the front. We were beaten in the military way; army was defeated by army; General Ludendorff by General Foch; poison gas by tank. An army nourished only on the certainty of victory, drilled only for that event, could not but flag when the hope of victory faded, when in every resting-time they witnessed the impudent indulgences on the lines of communication, and in front, in the firing line, learned to realize that no technical apparatus, neither U-boats nor heavy guns, nor long-range guns, nor poison-bombs, nor even the gigantic imposing gas-bags of Zeppelins, could effect anything permanent against the might of an Idea, a Faith. The home country did more and suffered more than was hitherto thought possible for human power, for men in the mass. But all

their pains could not avail to bring mankind one single step forward. Dost thou still swirl, stream of national energy, down mossy slopes and precipices, dost thou still swell high in eager passion, and leap the crag to a new bed of stones, in order to turn in the valley a mill-wheel half rusted away, at least half rusted away? The question often flashes through one's head. And to-morrow must the German energy of purpose still spend itself fruitlessly, be compelled to do at the beck of the conqueror what up till yesterday appeared to the blinded people the work of its own free will? Germany, who has no longer any companion to take a share of the burden, is to 'indemnify' all the hostile peoples (except the United States); without Alsace-Lorraine, the Saar region, North Schleswig, Posen, Upper Silesia, without gold, copper, oil, oversea trade, is it to create anew by the labor of its own hands all that its enemies have lost by the war? Such a task would last for scores of years and grind no bread-corn, warm no hearth, light no home, for the people chained to its enforced labor.

Let the eye of your soul, chief man of Britain, look away from the electoral contest in whose sunshine you now stand, victor at home as over the foreign foe let it glance back into the dust of the contest fought twelve years ago. Then Lord Milner, to-day your Minister for War, heard from a thousand throats an angry cry; that, in order to glut the greed of the mineowners, he should allow forced labor to be imposed on the Chinese in the Transvaal, was an outrage which the free Britons' sense of honor must make good instantly. The demand for the full costs of the war would compel the Germans, a whole nation of Europeans, to undergo the lot of coolies. In shaft and smelting furnace, in the weaver's

stool and at the smith's anvil, in the furrowed ploughland, the workshop, the machinery shed, the merchant's office, men would sweat, gnashing their teeth, to furnish the tribute. What Virgil says of oxen and of bees - that they draw the plough and make honey for others would be true of a whole human nation. With a national debt of 200,000,000,000, municipalities disorganized, industrial bodies crippled, nothing but what was barely necessary for sustaining life would be left them on this little planet; everything produced over and above that would have to be given over to the foreigner. Not the patience of the most patient could submit to such a yoke for long.

I do not believe that men whose being has been tinged with Western civilization desire the enslavement of a nation; that they think, in the quietness of peace, just as our militarists thought in the turmoil of battle, when they tossed the worldly goods of Austrians, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Turks into the pans of their fieldkitchens. The German who groans, saying that the throng of victors wants to murder him, to ruin his country's future, is given his answer: 'Since it was you who devised murder and destruction, you have no right to ask that we, after the huge agonies and sacrifices of a long-drawn-out defense, should take upon us in addition losses for which reparation can be made, should saddle our children and grandchildren with this heavy burden.' The murmur of complaint dies away; no gracious echo would be awakened by the trumpet tone if the Three upon the seat of judgment were indeed such as fear, the mother of hatred, paints them:

It is our wish that Germany should turn aside from schemes of military domination and devote all her strength to the great beneficent tasks of the world.-Lloyd George.

Only a diplomacy informed by a new spirit can make peace secure. He who wants to build a new house, must not use old, worn stones, antiquated rules of building. - Clemenceau.

Loud resounds, inaccessible only to the deaf, the cry for humanity, for the triumphant dominion of justice over all the world; and our most immediate duty appears to me to be to devote ourselves in friendship to mankind. Wilson.

Die Zukunft

The Three do not dream of shutting up the German people to the bitter condition of helots. Their eyes (so it seems to me) are turned upon this people, would like to discern clearly toward what new aim its will is bent, would gladly be convinced that the German soul has changed. And their eye strains, puzzles to make out whether the stream is not still wasting its torrent force to turn the rusty wheel.

JUDGED by externals, the British Empire may appear larger, and its future better assured than it was before the war. British territory is undi minished. No Dominion has fallen away. Not one Dependency has been captured or alienated. On the contrary, the area of Empire, or rather the scope of British administration, is likely to be largely increased by the inclusion of German colonies. But when the foundations of the world are out of course it would be foolish to imagine that the British portion of the edifice of human society has not been shaken in the tempest of men's wrath. There are cracks in the masonry which need inspection and repairing, lest, haply, we be found to be unwise master builders.

During the summer of 1912 I sat in a Berlin garden listening to some Germans who, with disconcertingly intimate knowledge of the failings of the English and with obviously sincere

conviction, were demonstrating to me that the British Empire had outgrown its usefulness and was tottering to its fall. They played upon the well-known theme of Treitschke, that what the British had once gained by force and fraud was now dropping out of the feeble hold of an emasculate democracy. The Dominions, they maintained, were tied to England by sentiment and wordy loyalty which would vanish into nothingness at the first strain of self-defense. The Crown Colonies and Dependencies were seething with sedition which one day would burst into open rebellion. Subsequent events have demonstrated the falsity of these jeremiads. The defensive coöperation of the many races included in the Empire is all the more wonderful when it is realized that such action was not swayed by blind ignorance, but by a genuine appreciation of the moral and political issues at stake. Whatever may be the dangers to the

British Empire, they do not lie in the direction from whence they were expected by my acquaintances in Berlin.

The truth is, the Germans were behind the times in imperial matters. They allowed neither for development nor for the growing power of moral ideals in democracy. Perhaps the historian of the future may affirm confidently that the supreme issue in this war now waning to its close was the domination of democracy as a form of government, and if this be so, then the development of the British Empire will be regarded as the history of the movement. There has been continuous development in the Empire, but not upon identical lines, nor without periods of retrogression. At one stage it seemed as though development was likely to go quite another way. . When the North American Colonies seceded from Great Britain there was no idea of a British Empire based upon freedom and acknowledging worldwide responsibilities. The immediate political effect in England of the Declaration of Independence, therefore, was not to give a salutary warning of the limitations of central authority, but to foster a deep distrust of colonial self-government. Instead of concentrating their attention upon those affairs which concerned the colonies as a whole, the English Government tried to centralize everything, great and small, in London. The paralyzing effect of this policy is almost beyond conception. Lord Durham, the great Canadian statesman, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the father of Australian colonization, have both drawn vivid pictures of the lamentable state of affairs. Abnormal centralization had destroyed the vigor of colonial executives, while the 'sighing rooms' in the Colonial Office wore away the hearts of those who tried to move the

Home Government to a forward policy, or who sought to redress wrongs. To this abnormal centralization must be attributed most of the separationist inclinations of those times. The change came gradually through the influence of the Manchester school of politicians, who believed that in time all the colonies would follow the example of the United States and fall away from Great Britain. This misconception of the Manchester school probably misled the Germans. But as the power of selfgovernment increased in the colonies, and as the British more fully welcomed colonial coöperation in imperial affairs so the separationist inclinations disappeared. Even Downing Street became popular when the problems of imperial administration were understood and the task of solving them was shared. If the Peace of Versailles (1783) was the beginning of the detested rule of 'Mr. Mother Country,' the first Imperial Conference marks the commencement of Britannic cooperation. This war, however, has advanced the situation still further. The imminence of the peril to their liberties in August, 1914, caused the Dominions to act with promptitude and decision. There was no question of compulsion. The presence of a common danger was in itself a revelation of the organic unity of the Empire under the new conditions of democracy. But, as the New Zealand correspondent of The Round Table shrewdly remarks,

It is not impossible that a new set of circumstances may arise in the future in which the danger might not be so evident and immediate, nor the sentiment compelling to unity of action so unanimous and prompt. Should this happen . . . there is danger of sectional and local interests overshadowing the interests of the Commonwealth as a whole.*

*The Round Table, March, 1919, pages 411-412.