war, and it is prosecuting
the war to the satisfaction of the majority of the electorate. But a
peace treaty is a different and an incomparably more important thing. Up
to the present the mind of the nation has found no expression, and it
probably will not find any expression unless the Government recognizes
fairly that it is a representative Government and behaves with the
deference which is due from a representative Government. As matters
stand, the mandate of the British Government will come, not from
Britain, but from Russia and France.

The great argument drawn from the Government's alleged duty to the
allied Governments is, no doubt, reinforced, in the minds of Ministers
and at Cabinet meetings, by two subsidiary arguments. The first of these
rests in the traditional assumption that all international politics must
be committed, perpetrated, and accomplished in secret. This strange
traditional notion will die hard, but some time it will have to die, and
at the moment of its death excellent and sincere persons will be
convinced that the knell of the British Empire has sounded. The knell of
the British Empire has frequently sounded. It sounded when capital
punishment was abolished for sheep-stealing, when the great reform bill
was passed, when purchase was abolished in the army, when the deceased
wife's sister bill was passed, when the Parliament act became law; and
it will positively sound again when the mediaeval Chinese traditions of
the Diplomatic Service are cast aside. There are many important people
alive today who are so obsessed by those traditions as to believe
religiously that if the British people, and by consequence the German
Government, were made aware of the peace terms, the German Army would in
some mysterious way be strengthened and encouraged, and our own ultimate
success imperiled. Such is the power of the dead hand, and against this
power the new conviction that in a democratic and candid foreign policy
lies the future safety of the world will have to fight hard.

The other subsidiary argument for ignoring the nation is that Ministers
are wiser than the nation, and therefore that Ministers must save the
nation from itself by making it impotent and acting over its head. This
has always been the argument of autocrats, and even of tyrants. It is a
ridiculous argument, and it was never more ridiculous than when applied
to the British Government and the British Nation today. Throughout the
war the G