"She might," said the King; "but not with the Liberals still in power; they couldn't reduce themselves to absurdity in that way. Still, supposing our declaration of war threw the Liberals out, what could the others do? Our trade in English goods comes to us mainly through France or Germany; and our own return trade is chiefly limited to our native crockery, toys, wood-carving, and needlework, supposed survivals of our peasant industries, which, as a matter of fact, are nearly all of them manufactured for us in Birmingham, the home of Tariff Reform. In that matter, by the taxing of articles which are only nominally made in Jingalo, English trade would suffer more than ours; and there might, in consequence, come about a real revival of our native crafts (an advantage which I had not previously thought of)--lacking our usual supply of the bogus article we should at last become honest in our professions and truthful in our trademarks. Let the Minister for Home Industries make a note of it." "The prospect your Majesty holds out is certainly alluring," replied the minister thus appealed to; "but if war is to teach us moral lessons, surely we ought to have moral reasons for engaging in it as well as business ones." "Well, if you want them, you've got them!" said the King. "If moral reasons were to count we ought to have been at war with England any day for the last fifty years. England has become--if she has not always been--a center of infection to the whole of Europe. Every disastrous experiment on which we have embarked has come from her. By her gross mismanagement of established institutions--the Church, the Peerage, the Army, Land, Labor, Capital--the whole system of voluntary service and voluntary education--she has driven the rest of Europe into revolutionary changes for which there was no necessity whatever. In avoiding the woeful example she has set us, of always standing still on the wrong leg, we have run ourselves off both our own. And now she is nourishing syndicalism like a bed of weeds, and sowing the seeds of it into her neighbors' territories. If you are looking for moral excuse there is no end to it; I preferred, however, to put it to you as a business proposition." "I must assure your Majesty," said the Prime Minister, "that your Majesty's present advisers have no intention whatever of making themselves responsible for a war on England, however advantageous the circumstances may seem." He might as well have spoken to the wind; with an increasing volubility of utterance the King went on-- "If it were decided," said he, "that an actual invasion of England were advisable, I have three separate plans now forming in my head, all equally feasible and promising, and all capable of being put into operation at one and the same time. Each one, in fact, would serve to divert attention from the others."