oms
us to dangerous hallucinations. We assume that we are the chosen
people, and we neglect the virtues which alone would justify our
election. For generations we have been reaping and wasting, instead of
ploughing and sowing. We have been living on our capital, nay, on our
credit, and have long since overdrawn our account. Our successes in
the past, sometimes the result of fortuitous circumstances, more often
of the blunders of our rivals, inspire a presumptuous confidence in
successes for the future and a conviction that come what may we are
destined to muddle through. A special providence is watching over
us--a cousin German to the Kaiser's "good old God." In truth we are
tempting Fate, postulating an exception to the law of cause and
effect, and looking for Hebrew miracles in the twentieth century after
Christ.

Were it otherwise, the nation would not have continued to entrust its
destinies to the men who misguided it consistently and perseveringly
for so many years, to the watchmen who saw nothing of the rocks and
sandbanks ahead which it was their function to discern and their duty
to avoid, and who are now unwittingly but effectually deluding the
people into believing that the present campaign, which is but a single
episode in a long-spun-out contest, is an independent event which
began in August 1914 and may end this year or the next. These same
leaders are busily inculcating the delusive notion that the diplomatic
instrument which will one day close hostilities will be a treaty of
peace. And they are seemingly prepared to negotiate its terms on that
assumption.

In truth, we are engaged in a duel which began thirty years ago, gave
the Germans such booty as Heligoland, their world-trade, their wealth,
their formidable navy, their Baghdad Railway, their various overseas
colonies, their European Allies, and the enormous resources with which
when this acute phase of the contest is over they will re-transfer the
venue to the economic and political domains and carry on the struggle
with greater vigour than before. And peace terms concluded on any
other supposition cannot be conducive to the national welfare. We are
locked in a deadly embrace with a compact people of 120,000,000, of
indomitable spirit, boundless resources, unquenchable faith and a
single aim. Yet we are already looking forward to the time in the near
future when our intercourse, however circumscribed, with this nation
will be essentially pacific, a