One more word before these vapourings cease. The national task in this war is still mighty enough to absorb all action, but not quite all thought, for it is no spasmodic effort, meaning nothing to the future. To carry the spirit of to-day into a long to-morrow, making of our patriotism not a mere torrent soon spent and leaving an arid plain, but a life-giving, even-flowing river—for that one must not lose the sense of continuity; one must think ahead. More! One must resolve—resolve that this new unity shall stand not only the strain of war, but the greater strain of the coming Peace. After—will come the test. Having guaranteed our country for the moment from destructive powers without, shall we at once redeliver it to the destructive powers within—go back to strife over Ireland, the Suffrage, the Welsh Church, and the Second Chamber? Or, preserving our new-found unity, settle generously and in a large spirit those distressful matters, and pass on to the real work—to a wider and freer view of Empire, to the right training of the nation, the right feeding of the nation, to securing for each man, woman, and child a solid foundation of health and hope; to the restoration of the land and of our food supply; to clearance of mutual suspicions, and the stablishing of a new trustfulness between Labour and Capital; to the banishment of inhumanity; the freeing of the eyes of Justice; and interment of the privileges of class? Shall we go back to rolling in the troughs of a dirty sea or set new sail and steer out with a true faith in our destiny as the Ship of Freedom and Justice? “When the devil was sick, the devil a saint would be, But when the devil got well, the devil a saint was he!” Is that to be our case? Let us not underrate the danger. At this moment and until the war is over, we are full of patriotism and good-will. We _have_ to be. There’s the trouble. Once Peace comes, and the unifying force of our common peril is over, what then? Is the old raw party spirit to ramp among us again? If a man would discover what danger there is of a return to every kind of disunity, let him take a definite national question and see how much of his private interest or conviction he is prepared to abate for the sake of the public good. Mighty little! Are we to dissolve again into those “rascally Radicals” and those “infernal Tories”; into “grinders of the poor” and “discontented devils”; into “brutal men” and “hysterical females” with all the other warring tribes of the Armageddon of Peace? Are we to lose utterly the inspiring vision of our Country, in the squabbles of domestic life? Some of that intense vision must go, alas! But surely not all. And yet all _will_ go unless we keep in mind the thought that this war is not an end, but the means to an end, which none of us will see, but all of us can further in time of peace as well as in time of war—an end for whose attainment the blood and treasure now spilled is but as a preliminary.