he pride of
a great nation, and taught them of an Empire on which the sun never
sets. What shall we say to them in the hour of defeat and after the
treaty of peace imposed by the victor? They will say: "Find us work and
we will earn our bread and in due time win back the greatness that has
been lost." But how are they to earn their bread? In this country half
the employers will have been ruined by the war. The other half will have
lost heavily, and much of the wealth even of the very rich will have
gone to keep alive the innumerable multitude of starving unemployed.
These will be advised after the war to emigrate. To what country?
Englishmen, after defeat, will everywhere be at a discount. Words will
not describe, and the imagination cannot realise, the suffering of a
defeated nation living on an island which for fifty years has not
produced food enough for its population.

The material and spiritual results of defeat can easily be recognised by
any one who takes the trouble to think about the question, though only
experience either at first hand or supplied by history can enable a man
fully to grasp its terrible nature. But a word must be said on the
social and political consequences inseparable from the wreck of a State
whose Government has been unable to fulfil its prime function, that of
providing security for the national life. All experience shows that in
such cases men do not take their troubles calmly. They are filled with
passion. Their feelings find vent in the actions to which their previous
currents of thought tended. The working class, long accustomed by its
leaders to regard the capitalists as a class with interests and aims
opposed to its own, will hardly be able in the stress of unemployment
and of famine to change its way of thinking. The mass of the workmen,
following leaders whose judgment may not perhaps be of the soundest but
who will undoubtedly sincerely believe that the doctrines with which
they have grown up are true, may assail the existing social order and
lay the blame of their misfortunes upon the class which has hitherto had
the government of the country in its hands and has supplied the leaders
of both political parties. The indignation which would inspire this
movement would not be altogether without justification, for it cannot be
denied that both political parties have for many years regarded
preparation for war and all that belongs to it as a minor matter,
subordinate to the really far