It is necessary for me, I am afraid, at the risk of going over some ground which will be familiar to my more well informed readers, to go back a page or two in political history, in order to explain the complicated and critical position that had arisen at the moment of which I type. Up to 1931 political history is very fully documented, owing to the decision of the then Labour Government to publish all the secret documents which it inherited both from its Tory and from its Cabal[9] predecessors. This publication has thrown a flood of light on the internal politics of the country, especially during the latter part of the Five Years’ War and the few years immediately following the outbreak of peace. Opinions will no doubt differ as to the propriety of the Labour Government’s action: there is a certain feeling of eaves-dropping when you read, as you may read nowadays, set out in the cold print of a history book, the confidential S.O.S. calls of a sorely harassed minister, with a vast number of conflicting claims to meet. The result, in any case, is that half-an-hour spent with Murdock’s _Twenty Years of Diplomacy_ or Hammond’s _George and his Critics_ will put the modern reader _au fait_ with all that preceded the accession to power of Rosenstein’s Labour Government in ’31. Over its own private difficulties the Labour Administration did not show a similar frankness, nor did its successors, whether Tory, Independent, or Democratic, see fit to avenge themselves in kind. The full history, then, of all this period remains to be written: I can only resume the facts as they are generally known for the benefit of readers to whom (as so often happens) the events to the Boer War are far more familiar than the movements of their own times. Lord Billericay, who took an active interest in politics in his young days, used to tell me that the Labour Government, in his opinion, might have lasted sixteen years instead of six if they had only let racing alone. The truth was that Charles Ropes, although he seemed the only possible leader of the party when Rosenstein went into his cure, was a doctrinaire of the old Nonconformist type. The result was that when the Horses Utilization Bill was thrown out and the Government resigned on it, there were bills for the disestablishment of the Church, universal secular education, the taxation of town sites, the abolition of the House of Lords, and the demobilization of two-thirds of the army, all waiting to pass their third reading and all regarded as non-contentious measures. In the very hour of its achievement the Government had gone out, leaving no permanent memorial of its tenure of office except Indian Home Rule and the Entente with Russia. Its publication of our treaties with foreign powers, from which such a commotion was expected, proved after all to be a false alarm; for the terms of them were so inconsistent with one another that they were immediately treated as forgeries.