rain upon the nations is
exhausting, but it does not kill men so horribly, and our rulers do not
feel it; for the people pay, and the concession-hunters, the
contractors, the company directors, and suchlike people with whom our
rulers chiefly associate, grow very fat.

If, then, Norman Angell's hopeful theory applies only partially to these
common wars of Imperial aggrandisement and the perpetual diplomatic war
by comparison of armaments, to what may we look for hope? Lord Rosebery
would be the last person to whom one would look for hope in general. His
hope is too like despair for prudence to smother. Yet, in his speech at
the Press banquet during the Imperial Conference of 1909, when he spoke
of our modern civilisation "rattling into barbarism," he gave a hint of
the movement to which alone I am inclined to trust. "I can only
foresee," he exclaimed, "the working-classes of Europe uniting in a
great federation to cry: 'We will have no more of this madness and
foolery, which is grinding us to powder!'" The words may not have been
entirely sincere--something had to be said for the Liberal Press tables,
which cheered while the Imperialists sat glum; but there, I believe,
lies the ultimate and only possible chance of hope. We must
revolutionise our Governments; we must recognise the abject folly of
allowing these vital questions of peace, war, and armaments to be
decided according to the caprice or advantage of a single man, a clique
of courtiers, a gang of adventurers, or the Cabal of a Cabinet formed
from the very classes which have most to gain and least to lose, whether
from actual war or the competition in armaments. Over this Executive,
whether it is called Emperor, King, Court, or Cabinet, the people of the
nation has no control--or nothing like adequate control--in foreign
affairs and questions of war. In England in the year 1910 not a single
hour was allowed for Foreign Office debate in the Commons. In no country
of Europe have the men and women of the State a real voice in a matter
which touches every man and every woman so closely as war touches
them--even distant war, but far more the kind of war that devastates the
larder, sweeps out the drawing-room, encamps in the back garden, and at
any moment may reduce the family by half.[17] One remembers that picture
in Carlyle, how thirty souls from the British village of Dumdrudge are
brought face to face with thirty souls from a French Dumdrudge, after
infinite effor