e new machines of the inventors, were earning only the fixed wage
of fifty shillings a week. I thought this arrangement made for unrest
and must prove dangerous after the war. So eager, so hot was his mind on
the end, that he missed the whole point of my remark. "What does it
matter," he exclaimed impatiently, "what we pay those boys as long as we
win the war?"

And the end of it was the humiliation of the General Election in 1918.
Where was the new world, then? He was conscious only of Lord
Northcliffe's menace. Germany must pay and the Kaiser must be tried!
There was no trumpet note in those days, and there has been no trumpet
note since. Imagine how Gladstone would have appealed to the conscience
of his countrymen! Was there ever a greater opportunity in
statesmanship? After a victory so tremendous, was there any demand on
the generosity of men's souls which would not gladly have been granted?
The long struggle between capital and labour, which tears every state in
two, might have been ended: the heroism and self-sacrifice of the war
might have been carried forward to the labours of reconstruction: the
wounds of Europe might have been healed by the charities of God almost
to the transfiguration of humanity.

Germany must pay for the war!--and he knew that by no possible means
could Germany be made to pay that vast account without the gravest
danger of unemployment here and Bolshevism in Central Europe! The Kaiser
must be tried!--and he knew that the Kaiser never would be tried!

Millennium dipped below the horizon, and the child's riding-whip which
Lord Northcliffe cracks when he is overtaken by a fit of Napoleonic
indigestion assumed for the Prime Minister the proportions of the
Damoclesian sword. He numbered himself among the Tououpinambos, those
people who "have no name for God and believe that they will get into
Paradise by practising revenge and eating up their enemies."

I can see nothing sinister in what some people regard as his plots
against those who disagree with him. He tries, first of all, to win them
to his way of thinking: if he fails, and if they still persist in
attacking him, he proceeds to destroy them. It is all part of life's
battle! But one would rather that the Prime Minister of Great Britain
was less mixed up in journalism, less afraid of journalism, and less
occupied, however indirectly, in effecting, or striving to effect,
editorial changes. His conduct in the last months of the war and d