[16] The paragraph is worth preserving in its entirety: "Mr. W. N. Ewer, who lectured at Finchley for the Union of Democratic Control, has explained that the report which we published of his speech is unfair, and that he is really in substantial agreement with Mr. Asquith. This is disingenuous, and Mr. Ewer knows it is. He has not repudiated the correctness of the report, which stated that he dilated on the danger of British navalism, and declared that we must give up singing 'Rule Britannia!' nor has he repudiated his remarks as to the pleasure which the tune of the Austrian National Anthem gave him. Does he think that Mr. Asquith would substantially agree with that? Or the country?"—The Evening Standard, July 26, 1915.
[17] I cannot help reproducing here a letter which originally appeared in the Manchester Guardian at the time of the Boer War, and is quoted by Mr. Norman Angell in The Great Illusion, p. 281.
"Sir,—I see that 'The Church's Duty in Regard to War' is to be discussed at the Church Congress. This is right. For a year the heads of our Church have been telling us what war is and does—that it is a school of character; that it sobers men, cleans them, strengthens them, knits their hearts; makes them brave, patient, humble, tender, prone to self-sacrifice. Watered by 'war's red rain,' one Bishop tells us, virtue grows; a cannonade, he points out, is an 'oratorio'—almost a form of worship. True; and to the Church men look for help to save their souls from starving for lack of this good school, this kindly rain, this sacred music. Congresses are apt to lose themselves in wastes of words. This one must not, surely cannot, so straight is the way to the goal. It has simply to draft and submit a new Collect for war in our time, and to call for the reverent but firm emendation, in the spirit of the best modern thought, of those passages in Bible and Prayer Book by which even the truest of Christians and the best of men have at times been blinded to the duty of seeking war and ensuing it. Still, man's moral nature cannot, I admit, live by war alone; nor do I say with some that peace is wholly bad. Even amid the horrors of peace you will find little shoots of character fed by the gentle and timely rains of plague and famine, tempest and fire; simple lessons of patience and courage conned in the schools of typhus, gout, and stone; not oratorios, perhaps, but homely anthems and rude hymns played on knife and probe in the long winter nights. Far from me to 'sin our mercies,' or to call mere twilight dark. Yet dark it may become; for remember that even these poor makeshift schools of character, these second-bests, these halting substitutes for war—remember that the efficiency of every one of them, be it hunger, accident, ignorance, sickness, or pain, is menaced by the intolerable strain of its struggles with secular doctors, plumbers, inventors, schoolmasters, and policemen. Every year thousands who would once have been braced and steeled by manly tussles with small-pox or diphtheria are robbed of that blessing by the great changes made in our drains. Every year thousands of women and children must go their way bereft of the rich spiritual experience of the widow and the orphan."
[18] Cf. the present writer's introduction to Whyte-Melville's Gladiators in Everyman's Library, 1911.
[19] It was certainly, for example, the Headline Instinct which caused Mr. John Lane, a publisher of some repute, to impose on Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer's novel The Saddest Story, one of the most remarkable novels of the century, such an absurdly irrelevant title as The Good Soldier. The Good Soldier was published in April, 1915. The evidence that the publisher must have changed the title just before publication is that an instalment of it had appeared serially as The Saddest Story in the summer of 1914, and that as The Saddest Story it actually figured in Mr. John Lane's catalogue at the end of the book.
[20] Matyas Diak of Budapest.
[21] So in Germany the fixing of maximum prices for pigs and potatoes was immediately followed by an almost complete withdrawal from the market of potatoes and pigs—the German farmers refused to sell except at their own inflated prices. Cf. quotations from the German Press in The New Statesman of January 29, 1916.
[22] "Ces choses sont plutôt des moyens que l'on emploie pour travailler à faire prospérer l'Etat qu'ils ne sont l'essence de sa prospérité."—Rousseau, Political Writings, I, 345 (C. E. Vaughan's edition).
[23] See, for instance, the Report of the Committee of Public Accounts (commenting on the extravagance of Admiralty and War Contracts), summarised in The Times of August 19, 1916.
[24] See Orage, National Guilds, p. 170 ff.