Such a scheme will not come down to us from Heaven. From our own brains and wills it must spring; from our sense of—shall we say—the inconvenience of wars like this. If the killing and disablement of some ten million men, the waste of some ten to twenty thousand million pounds, persuades us to nothing but the leaving of the world exactly as it was, as liable to these irruptions of death and misery—then, better say with the Spanish poet, “Of all the misfortunes of man, the greatest is to have been born.” Even before the guns cease roaring, shall not our nine Allied peoples agree informally among themselves upon the structure of a League for Peace, and secure the sympathetic understanding of America, and the other neutral countries, on whose wisdom and good-will so much depends? I, for one, would wish my Country foremost in pursuing this great chance—wish that she might place all her power in the favouring scale; I would wish to see her as ready to submit to the decisions of an International Tribunal, as each one of us is ready as a matter of course to submit to the decisions of our judges. We in this green Britain of ours, still free of the invader’s foot, can measure the value of freedom now, looking across to lands waiting for deliverance. No country of Europe but has suffered, during long centuries, outrage and trampling, siege and slaughter, that we have been spared—saved by our sea. It is not irony that calls these the islands of the blessed. But Fortune is a jealous goddess; and offerings are due to her who has given us an inviolate soil. I seem to see Fortune standing apart, watching—wondering. “What have they made—what are they going to make of their Land?” I seem to see Fortune thinking: “If I grant them success once more, these islanders, are they great enough to survive it? Under my smile the empires of the past one by one went down—Assyria, Egypt, Persia, Rome, others of long, long ago. Will this empire live, or will it too rot away, and sink?” Those empires of the past fell through prosperity, through inordinate pride, through luxury and slavery hand in hand. May Fortune hold up a mirror to us, that we see ourselves as we are! Freedom and Humanity are not mere words; nor is a people’s greatness measured in acres or in pounds, in the number of its ships on the sea, or of the rifles it can muster. A people’s greatness is in the breadth and quality of its soul, in its fortitude, alertness, justice, gentleness, within itself and to the world without; and in its faith that man has his fate in his own hands.