It is idle to deny that there are traitors in our own camp; men of position and influence who are more pro-German than British—who would not scruple to pave the way to any dishonour provided they could serve their own personal ends. Is any one so intellectually blind and bereft of common sense as to suppose that even with certain of our statesmen financial interests do not outweigh their patriotism? Time is a merciless revealer of facts, and in its record of this war some strange things will be written!
To those who have eyes to watch and brains to understand, the advent of Mr. Hughes, Premier of Australia, is a wonderful, almost touching, circumstance. Here is a Man at last!—a man who loves his country and is not afraid to say so—a man who appeals to the right spirit of the nation straightly and truly, with courage and conviction. “The People” answer to his voice: that “People” whom snobs abhor! Snobbery is apt to speak of the fine Younger Race of Imperial Britain as “Colonials,” with a touch of contempt, as though they represented something small and negligible, instead of embodying as they do the future power and stability of the Empire. This “Colonial” Prime Minister shows strength, boldness, and sincerity; he is a leader, and “All we like sheep” are disposed to follow him, if he can show us a way out of the thickets where we wander, torn and bleeding. Pray Heaven he be not wearied by specious talk, or repelled by still more specious hypocrisy! or hampered and discouraged by the working of the “wheels within wheels” which move with such secret and perplexing intricacy, crushing honest effort and smothering honest speech! Surely the British people can be trusted to know what their foes know, what their Allies know, what America knows? Are they alone to be deceived?—even into purchasing goods “from America” which are German? Mr. Hughes needs to speak yet more forcibly; he must rouse the slothful and the unthinking, and tell them that if they would conquer their skilful and insidious Teuton foe, they must equally conquer themselves; and that when the markets are open for British labour, British labour must not fall back in energy or stint its output. Business must go hand-in-hand with industry and quickness, for “the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong!”
“All we like sheep” are waiting, not for compromise, but for conquest; conquest full, splendid and lasting! The “People” are patient and submissive enough, but they seek to put their confidence in a Government that shows confidence in itself. If they feel that they cannot do this, what then? Should not the following words of Carlyle be remembered?:—
“Urge not this noble, silent People. Rouse not the Berseker rage that lies in them! Do you know their Cromwells, Hampdens, their Pyms and Bradshaws? Men very peaceable, but men that can be made very terrible! Men, who like their old Fathers in Agrippa’s days, have a soul that despises death; to whom death, compared with falsehoods and injustices, is light! Yes, just so godlike as this People’s patience was, even so godlike must its impatience be!”
WANTED—MORE WOMEN!
AN APPEAL (Written for the London “Daily Chronicle”)
Women! You are wanted by the Nation! In the words of the recruiting posters “Your Country calls!” It calls even You—you, who for centuries have been the “weak vessels” of man’s passion and humour, are now needed to strengthen man’s hands in the terrific business of a world’s battle. You have helped them already; but you must help them still more. Now is the day and hour to prove your “undaunted mettle,” and not only your mettle but your generosity, your magnanimity, your forgiveness! For in peace times man has denied you the very possession of ordinary common sense; he has thrust you out of intellectual and academic honours; he has grudged you any place in art, literature or science, and he has made you the butt of every cynic, comedian, and caricaturist ever since he arrogated to himself the “everything” of life. You have been and are the grist to the mill of the comic press; your fathers have often been glad to sell you in the marriage market to the highest bidders; your lovers have played with you and deserted you as bees the flowers whose honey they have stolen; your husbands have often been faithless and perjured; and in certain of man’s legal forms, you have been classed with “children, criminals, and lunatics,” but now!—now, you are wanted!
You, so often despised, are prayed not to return scorn with scorn; you, with your patience, doggedness, and strongly determined zeal for attainment, are asked to come forward in your willing thousands, and let the men go! For the cry is “havoc!—and let slip the dogs of war!”—war, bitter, merciless, bloody and more savage than the crudest wars of ancient days; war in the air, on the earth and under seas—war that is as stupid, as blind, as criminal and as selfish as are all the acts which men commit when they have so far brutalised woman as to check and restrain her highest impulses, kill her idealism, obstruct her intellectual aspirations, and treat her as the slave and tool of a degrading animalism. Had they from the first dawn of civilisation made her their mental and spiritual equal, by this time there would have been no wars. Her love would have constrained and educated them, her instincts guided them, her inborn maternity shielded them from the wrongs their ambitions and jealousies persuade them to wreak upon each other. Now, in the very midst of the combat which they have brought upon themselves, they are caught within a black cloud of almost superhuman disaster, where but one ray of the veiled sun shines through—that Divine sense of Justice for which all true peoples are bound to fight if indeed they be not wholly given over to the devil of Materialism.
In this, women are, and must be, with them; they, who from the legended days of Eve have laboured under the sense of utter injustice, will be eager to help in any struggle for the Right against Might, because it is their own cause—the very essence of their own existence.