For all the foregoing argument no military expertise is necessary. It lies on a plane above military expertise. It appeals to common-sense and it cannot be gainsaid. I have not yet met anybody of real authority who has attempted to gainsay it, or who has not endorsed it. The sole question is, not whether we shall win or lose, but when we shall win. For this reason I strongly object to statesmen, no matter who they be, going about and asserting to listening multitudes that we are fighting for our very existence as a nation. We most emphatically are not. It is just conceivable that certain unscrupulous marplots might by chicane produce such domestic discord in this country as would undermine the very basis of victory. I regard the thing as in the very highest degree improbable, but it can be conceived. The result might be an inconclusive peace, and another war, say, in twenty years, when we probably _should_ be fighting for our very existence as a nation. But we are not now, and at the worst shall not be for a long time, fighting for our very existence as a nation. Nobody believes such an assertion; pessimists themselves do not believe it. And when statesmen give utterance to it in the hope of startling the working-class into a desired course of conduct, they under-rate the intelligence of the working-class and the result of such oratory is far from what they could wish. Our national existence is as safe as it has been any time this century; indeed, it is safer, for its chief menace has received a terrible blow, and the Prussian superstition is exploded. All that can be urged is that we have an international job to finish; that in order to finish it properly and within a reasonable period we must work with a will and in full concord; and that if we fail to do this the job will be botched, with a risk of sinister consequences to the next generation. The notion that to impress the public it is necessary to pile on the agony with statements that no moderately enlightened person can credit, is a wrong notion, and, like all wrong notions, can only do harm. The general public is all right, quite as all right as the present Government or any other. Had it not been so we should not be where we are today, but in a far less satisfactory position. Not Governments, not generals, but the masses make success in these mighty altercations. Read Tolstoi's "War and Peace." The War and Racial Progress [From the Morning Post of London, July 2, 1915]