reasures before
the envious eyes of militant nations, practically undefended, save for
its slender ring of circling ships. There it lay, a constant and
irresistible lure, especially to that parvenu and predatory Germanic
Power which had appeared upon the European scene, as the offspring of
treachery and violence, in 1871. Thus those politicians--they were to be
found in all parties--who refused to face the new conditions, who
persisted in maintaining that the voluntary principle, which sufficed to
police an Empire externally secure, would also guard it against a world
in arms, did their unwitting best to render an attack inevitable, and to
ensure that when it burst upon us it should do us the maximum of damage.

In due time, that is, when Germany thought that "the day" had dawned,
the war came. Then the voluntary principle manifested its proper fruits.
We found ourselves suddenly called upon to confront the supreme crisis
of our fate with a gigantic proletariat untrained and unarmed, and with
a diminutive army (below even its nominal strength), wholly inadequate
to the magnitude of its tasks. What were the consequences? They were
these: First, that our devoted Expeditionary Force, insufficient and
unsupported, was sent across the Channel to almost certain and complete
annihilation; secondly, that masses of reserves urgently needed on the
Continent had to be kept in these islands to counter the risks of
invasion; thirdly, that the mobility of our Navy had to be sacrificed to
the same necessity of domestic defence (hence the disaster to Admiral
Cradock); and, finally, that Belgium and North-East France had to be
abandoned to the enemy--to be recovered later, if possible, at the cost
of tens of thousands of lives.

One would have thought that at such a crisis of destiny our politicians
would have faced the facts, would have realized that the time had come
to summon the nation, as a disciplined whole, to front its peril and do
its duty. If they had but had the courage to do so, who can doubt the
loyalty of the response? But, once more, No! All sorts of irrelevant
considerations of petty domestic politics--matters of votes and seats
and party prejudices--determined the issue. The voluntary principle must
at any cost be maintained sacrosanct and intact. Hence, to get the
necessary men--or, rather, far fewer than the necessary men--every
variety of extravagant and humiliating expedient had to be adopted.
Hundreds of thousands