have been steadfastly doing during the past thirty
years. The British and their allies are being overcome less by German
skill and cleverness than by their own sluggishness, narrowness of
outlook and love of ease. As the German professor, whose utterances I
have already quoted, tersely put it: "My confidence is founded above
all else on our enemies' incapacity for organization." In truth, it is
not inborn incapacity to which we owe our unquestioned inferiority,
but to the atrophy of will-power which is one of the consequences of
years of egotism, overweening confidence, self-indulgence and the loss
of an inspiring social faith.

Now, there is every reason to assume that these master facts are not
yet recognized by our rulers, who seem perfectly contented that the
nation should go on living as before from hand to mouth, with no
far-reaching views for the future. This insular narrow-mindedness is
natural. For the Ministers in power are the same who obstinately
refused to credit the evidence of their senses, which went to prove
that Germany was bending all her energies to the successful
prosecution of a formidable campaign against us and our presumptive
allies for a whole generation. The frank recognition of this state of
masked hostility would have imposed on the Government the correlate
duty of taking up the challenge, readjusting our public life to the
altered conditions, urging the nation to make heavy sacrifices and
dissatisfying radical constituencies, whose one ideal is to devote
themselves exclusively to parochial policy and domestic legislation.
And the chiefs of the party in power lacked the mental and moral
strength to throw off their deep-rooted apprehension of the
consequences to party prospects, of increased taxation and other
burdens of citizenship. They never grasped the situation as a whole,
but restricted their survey to each fragmentary question as it was
thrust into the foreground of actualities and eliminated every other.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE PERILS OF PARTY POLITICS

No bold, broad, stable policy, therefore, was ever conceived by those
party politicians. The vast organization which was destined to destroy
the old order of things in Europe, and whose manifestations were an
open book to all observers who brought acuteness and patience to the
study, was not merely ignored by them--its very existence was denied,
and those who refused to join the ranks of the deniers were
brand-marked as mischi