that the
verdict of posterity will not give the palm of achievement to England,
who has not only carried out everything that she promised to do before
the war, but has incidentally and in the course of it created and
equipped an Army on a Continental scale, and otherwise done very much
more for the assistance of her Allies than was contemplated before the
war began.

It is untrue to say that we were unprepared for the war. We were
more than prepared to do all that we promised to do. What we were
unprepared for was finding ourselves required to turn ourselves
into, not only the greatest naval Power in the world, but one of the
greatest military Powers also. This demand was sprang upon us, and we
have met it with extraordinary success. The whole idea that Germany's
achievement has been such as to warrant any attempt on our part to
model our institutions on her pattern seems to me to fall to pieces
as soon as one looks calmly at the actual results produced by the
different systems. Moreover, even if we were to admit that Germany's
achievement in the war has been immeasurably greater than ours, it
still would not follow that we could improve matters here by following
the German system. It ought not to be necessary to observe that a
system which is good for one nation or individual is not necessarily
good for another. In the simple matter of diet, for instance, a most
scientifically planned diet given to a child who does not happen to
like it will not do that child any good. These things ought to be
obvious, but unfortunately in these times, which call for eminently
practical thought and effort, there is a curious doctrinaire spirit
abroad, and the theorist is continually encouraged to imagine how much
better things would be if everything were quite different, whereas
what we want is the application of practical common sense to practical
facts as they are.

In the realm of finance the freedom and individual initiative and
elasticity of our English system have long been the envy of the world.
Our banking system, as was shown, on an earlier page, has always
worked with much less restriction on the part of legislative and
official interference than any other, and, with the help of this
freedom from official control, English bankers and finance houses had
made London the financial centre of the world before the war. The
attempt of Parliament to control banking by Peel's Act of 1844 was
quietly set aside by the banking machin