"Yet it was immediately followed by wholesale desertions from the firing-line and a general disintegration of military discipline. It seems, then, that we were wrong; for otherwise it would be a curious irony that a movement designed for the better conduct of the War should produce a complete stagnation on your fighting fronts; or, to look at it from another point of view, that a Revolution which owed its success to the War, since, in such a war as this, the Army and the nation are one, should have, for its immediate consequence, an apparent failure on your part to remember the purpose for which the War is being fought.
"No doubt many motives were at work, and it was perhaps natural that in the joy of your new-found freedom you should be tempted to forget the conditions that had made it possible, and to regard the War as something outside and remote, and its importance as small compared with the achievement of internal liberty.
"Well, we have tried patiently to see things with your eyes, and now you in your turn must please make an effort to see them with ours. From the first, when we in England took on this War, we recognised that the country which was bound to get most good out of it was Russia. For her we hoped that it was to be in the fullest sense a War of Liberation. Your Allies would win liberty from external menace, but you would also see the bonds of internal tyranny broken. The Tsar, the little father of his people, had a chance, such as falls to few, of giving to his nation something of the true freedom that we in England know.
"He missed his chance. We will not ask why, but he missed it. Yet by other means the War has been for you a War of Liberation, and, if you break your pledge to see it through, you do not deserve your freedom. Nay more, you run the risk of losing it; or, if, through the steadfastness of your sworn Allies, you keep it, then you keep it at the cost of sacrificing the friendship and sympathy of all free nations who are fighting in the cause of liberty; and, on those terms, your own freedom is not worth having.
"Some of you argue that Russia's pledge to her Allies was an Imperialist pledge and that you have the right to ignore it. Have you forgotten so soon that the prime cause of Russia's entry into this quarrel was that Austria had threatened to crush a free nation, Serbia, whose race and faith are yours? Besides, a pledge like that is still a pledge, though governments may change. Would you have it so that no people, from this time on, shall trust the word of Russia for fear that a new régime might repudiate it?
"We have been patient and made allowances. We know that a great nation like yours cannot overthrow an age-long tyranny without being shaken through every fibre of its being. Time was needed for you to recover your balance and to resume a sane view of your obligations to others than yourselves. So we have been patient, and are patient still, though the inaction on your Front and your withdrawal from your part in the common struggle have made our burden in France far harder to bear.
"If you fail us, we shall no less fight on, we others. 'We shall march prospering—not through your presence.' We shall fight on till the ideals of Kaiserism, your worst enemy, are crushed. America, that great Republic that loves peace as passionately as you, will take your place, will fill up the gap that you leave in the ranks of those who fight for freedom. And we shall fight till we get the true peace that we want—not the peace which some of you have advocated, fraternising with the common foe, listening to the specious pleas of those who shirk the one test of their honesty when they are asked to revolt against a tyranny as least as deadly as that which you have yourselves overthrown.
"But you will not fail us, I know. Your hearts, as a nation, were once in this War; heavy as our sacrifices have been, yours have been heavier still. Why should you change? Why should the birth of your own freedom be the death of your sympathy with the cause of the freedom of the world? No, you cannot fail us; you are too great for that.
"Forgive me," Mr. Punch concluded, "if, in speaking from a full heart, I have allowed myself an excess of candour. At home they have always been very kind and let me have a charter to say just what I think; and I have been doing it, without much distinction of persons, for seventy-five years and more. If to you, who have been dumb so long, this seems beyond belief, permit me to offer you, with sincere affection and regard, a visible proof of my privilege in the shape of my