"There is evidence of slackness; the effort has got to be quickened; all must put their backs into it to save the country. Our international trade is in peril, and our home trade is depressed by reduction of output and the increased cost of production. Words must be translated into action unless thousands of lives are to be sacrificed to hunger and cold; this is no hyperbole."
Such, as we know, are specimens of periodic if unpalatable pessimisms provided by prominent personalities. The experience of Sir Edward Grey, as he tells us, is that the difficulty is not so much to tell the truth, as to get the truth believed. Were we then really living in a fool's paradise? Could it truthfully be said that we as a community were consenting to become a "League of Dupes," as the Nations have been banded together as a League? Heaven forbid! for just as it would be idle to imagine that there will be no more strikes, no extremist incitement to anarchy, so too in the considered opinion of Mr. Lloyd George "it would be folly to assume that human nature will never give way to passion again, and that there will be no war. A nation that worked on that assumption might regret its conduct." Unfortunately, there is no denying the fact—as a captured German naval officer once tersely put it—that although they (the Germans) could never be gentlemen, we (the British) would ever be fools! Hence it comes about that at a time when "the most pressing interest of humanity is that the profit and loss account of a barbarous bid for world-power should show an impressive balance on the wrong side," it is open to argument whether the policy embodied in the Treaty of Versailles, of "tempering justice with mercy," was altogether prudent; mercy, that is, which "could not speak more eloquently than it does in the unmutilated landscape of German agriculture, and in the immunity of her civilians from all the horrors of her own practice as an invader" (cp. Pall Mall Gazette, June 28th, 1919).
Be that as it may, "once bitten" is proverbially and habitually "twice shy," so that it would seem well-nigh inconceivable that a lesson of such magnitude as the Nation has learnt during the long-drawn-out agony of the world-war can readily be forgotten; and whatever the future all unknown may hold in store for us, undimmed in the minds of succeeding generations will most surely shine as a guiding light the splendid record of private enterprise and of individual endeavour as exemplified by the great railway companies of the British Isles, amongst which pride of place can scarcely be withheld from the London and North-Western Railway, to whom the country, without doubt, owes a deep and lasting debt of gratitude.
"En avant!" then, as surely those who gave their all would have us do. "En avant!" that their sacrifice supreme shall not have been in vain. "En avant!" and may our thankfulness and pride go out to them in that "great unknown beyond," where they—
"... shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn,
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them."
