If, even while we are at war, we cannot keep the feeling that what we are fighting for is a permanent and steady advance in the just and reasonable life of nations, _beginning with ourselves_, we had better never have fought, for at the end we shall but have added to our vanity, and taken from the stock of our patience, our humanity, and our sense of justice. And so the feelings of the present are linked with the feelings and necessities that will arrive with peace. If the fine phrases we have used, and are still using, about Liberty, Humanity, Democracy, and Peace are not genuinely felt, they will come home to us and roost most vilely. By the outside world we shall be judged according to the measure of actuality we give hereafter to the claim we now make of being champion of Freedom and Humanity; and only according to our inward habit of thought during the war shall we be able to act when it is over. We can _do_ nothing now perhaps, save prosecute the fight to its appointed end; but, if we are not to turn out fraudulent after the event, it is already time to feel ahead—to accustom our minds to the thought of the future efforts, Imperial and social, needful to meet future dangers, and to fulfil the trusts we shall have taken up. From facile imaginings and Utopian dreams of a purged social life and a fortified _morale_ to the real conditions that this war will leave is likely to be the farthest cry any of us will ever hear. We cannot have it both ways. If war, as most of us believe, is a terrible calamity, it will not leave an improved world. A sloppy optimism is not the slightest good, no more than a deliberate pessimism. “It will be all right after the war!” is, no doubt, the attitude of many minds just now. It will only be all right after the war if, with all the might of a sustained national will, we take care that it is. A great and solemn opportunity, the greatest our country has ever known, will be there, to be made or marred. The records of history are not too cheering, and experience of human nature in the past brings no very happy augury—for after too great effort comes reaction. But this age has higher aspirations, more self-consciousness than any that has gone before. To turn the possible calamity of this war to blessing we shall have to set our foot on Fatalism. There is no real antagonism between the doctrines of Determinism and Free Will. When things have happened, we see that they must have happened as they did; but how does this affect the freedom of our will _before_ they happen—before we know which way they will turn out? Men and nations are what they make themselves. What are we going to make ourselves—after? II—FREEDOM AND PRIVILEGE What is this thing called the British Empire? A family of children, ruled by a Mother, or a gathering of kinsfolk under the roof of one ideal? Is it in reality an Empire or a Confederacy? It has been the first, it is fast becoming the second.