914, they would never have got me into
khaki." And that, of course, was precisely why it had been necessary
to stuff him with a romance that any diplomatist would have laughed at.
Thus the natural confusion of ignorance was increased by a deliberately
propagated confusion of nursery bogey stories and melodramatic nonsense,
which at last overreached itself and made it impossible to stop the war
before we had not only achieved the triumph of vanquishing the German
army and thereby overthrowing its militarist monarchy, but made the very
serious mistake of ruining the centre of Europe, a thing that no sane
European State could afford to do.

The Dumb Capables and the Noisy Incapables

Confronted with this picture of insensate delusion and folly, the
critical reader will immediately counterplead that England all this time
was conducting a war which involved the organization of several
millions of fighting men and of the workers who were supplying them with
provisions, munitions, and transport, and that this could not have been
done by a mob of hysterical ranters. This is fortunately true. To pass
from the newspaper offices and political platforms and club fenders and
suburban drawing-rooms to the Army and the munition factories was to
pass from Bedlam to the busiest and sanest of workaday worlds. It was
to rediscover England, and find solid ground for the faith of those who
still believed in her. But a necessary condition of this efficiency
was that those who were efficient should give all their time to their
business and leave the rabble raving to its heart's content. Indeed the
raving was useful to the efficient, because, as it was always wide
of the mark, it often distracted attention very conveniently from
operations that would have been defeated or hindered by publicity. A
precept which I endeavored vainly to popularize early in the war, "If
you have anything to do go and do it: if not, for heaven's sake get out
of the way," was only half carried out. Certainly the capable people
went and did it; but the incapables would by no means get out of the
way: they fussed and bawled and were only prevented from getting very
seriously into the way by the blessed fact that they never knew where
the way was. Thus whilst all the efficiency of England was silent and
invisible, all its imbecility was deafening the heavens with its clamor
and blotting out the sun with its dust. It was also unfortunately
intimidating the Governmen