And, looking first at home, we have got to get used now, at once, while we are still fighting, before we have the leisure and the energy to revive old animosities and party cries, to the idea that civil strife in Ireland after this war is over would be criminal lunacy, making us the playboy of the world, and destroying the prestige we shall have gained. It seems that our statesmen now recognize this. But whatever seems to settle the Irish question in time of war may not survive the strain of the peace that follows. If the lamentable cleavage in Ireland reappears—as it well may, for it is based on such real differences of temperament—let us in England be resolute not to be re-involved in partizanship. Let us resolve to force neither one party nor the other; confine ourselves to insisting that those who object so strenuously to inclusion in an opposite camp shall be as loth to include their opponents as they are to be included. Only of its own free will can Ireland ever be made one. If the halves be not forced, they will become one the faster. Time is the healer; time and forbearance, given an elastic machinery to encourage and ripen reconciliation. Of a surety, renewed trouble over Ireland would be the very worst augury for the future of an Empire that stands, and is to stand, for Freedom. To be trustee for the principle “Live and let live”; watchdog against aggression by herself or any other; cornerstone of a world so built that all peoples, however small and weak, may know that they can safely work out their own destinies—that would be for Britain the grand ideal. But the British Empire can only hope to stand for it by keeping the form of a Free Confederacy, by the most rigid scrutiny of its own conduct, and by developing the feeling that it is beneath Imperial dignity to wrest material benefit from the losses of others.