Is it too early for a united effort, to think out, in readiness for peace, a scheme of parliamentary procedure which shall afford time for the serious and uninterrupted consideration of non-party measures, and the furtherance of needed reforms?
Party no longer exists, but they who think it has gone for good dwell in a fools’ paradise. As sure as fate it will spring up again, because it is rooted in temperamental difference. But must it come back with all its old cat-and-dog propensities, and waste of national time? It will, unless some method be devised that will remove some of party’s unhandsome opportunities and save it from itself. Politicians alone know the difficulties, many and great, in the way of a better procedure. Surely, while faction is in abeyance, Parliament will set its wits to overcoming those difficulties, so that when the war ends we may not witness again the tedious and distressful blocking of so many needed measures that prevailed aforetime. Party was made for the Country, not the Country for Party; and what was tolerated with Job-like patience before this vast upheaval is not by any means likely to be tolerated after. Needs will be more insistent; the sense of reality much greater; the aspiration towards National Health a live thing, because it will be so desperately necessary.
Reform of parliamentary procedure is obviously the prime precedent for national reform. Shall not then the question be even now given all the attention that can be spared to it? What better moment—when men of all parties are filled with the one great thought—Our Country!
V—A LAST WORD
One more word before these vapourings cease. The national task in this war is still mighty enough to absorb all action, but not quite all thought, for it is no spasmodic effort, meaning nothing to the future. To carry the spirit of to-day into a long to-morrow, making of our patriotism not a mere torrent soon spent and leaving an arid plain, but a life-giving, even-flowing river—for that one must not lose the sense of continuity; one must think ahead. More! One must resolve—resolve that this new unity shall stand not only the strain of war, but the greater strain of the coming Peace. After—will come the test. Having guaranteed our country for the moment from destructive powers without, shall we at once redeliver it to the destructive powers within—go back to strife over Ireland, the Suffrage, the Welsh Church, and the Second Chamber? Or, preserving our new-found unity, settle generously and in a large spirit those distressful matters, and pass on to the real work—to a wider and freer view of Empire, to the right training of the nation, the right feeding of the nation, to securing for each man, woman, and child a solid foundation of health and hope; to the restoration of the land and of our food supply; to clearance of mutual suspicions, and the stablishing of a new trustfulness between Labour and Capital; to the banishment of inhumanity; the freeing of the eyes of Justice; and interment of the privileges of class?
Shall we go back to rolling in the troughs of a dirty sea or set new sail and steer out with a true faith in our destiny as the Ship of Freedom and Justice?
“When the devil was sick, the devil a saint would be,
But when the devil got well, the devil a saint was he!”
Is that to be our case? Let us not underrate the danger. At this moment and until the war is over, we are full of patriotism and good-will. We have to be. There’s the trouble. Once Peace comes, and the unifying force of our common peril is over, what then? Is the old raw party spirit to ramp among us again? If a man would discover what danger there is of a return to every kind of disunity, let him take a definite national question and see how much of his private interest or conviction he is prepared to abate for the sake of the public good. Mighty little! Are we to dissolve again into those “rascally Radicals” and those “infernal Tories”; into “grinders of the poor” and “discontented devils”; into “brutal men” and “hysterical females” with all the other warring tribes of the Armageddon of Peace? Are we to lose utterly the inspiring vision of our Country, in the squabbles of domestic life? Some of that intense vision must go, alas! But surely not all. And yet all will go unless we keep in mind the thought that this war is not an end, but the means to an end, which none of us will see, but all of us can further in time of peace as well as in time of war—an end for whose attainment the blood and treasure now spilled is but as a preliminary.
It will be heart-breaking if from this stupendous cataclysm no lasting good to the world and to Britain can be brought forth. Its horror, even now, few realize who are not at the front. One who was many months on ambulance duty in the French lines wrote these words: