Far more profitable, obviously, than hunting war excitement was examination of the causes which accounted for its absence, and to that I forthwith devoted myself. In the first place, there was the navy, "England’s All in All." By a fortuitous circumstance, for which, with all his faults, the Empire must render imperishable gratitude to its young half-American First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, the Fleet was instantly at its "war stations," fully mobilized, and in a state of battle-readiness and general efficiency unparalleled in British history. War maneuvers on an unapproached scale had been in progress for the preceding fortnight or three weeks. Only the merest word of command was wanting to convert the Grand Fleet into the battering-ram and shield, to constitute which in the hour of emergency it had been created. "Ringed by her leaden seas," which were held, moreover, by a "supreme" armada, there seemed every justification for equanimity, for the United Kingdom has no frontiers which an invading army can violate as long as Britannia rules the waves. The domestic political situation, more menacingly turbulent than at any time within the memory of living Englishmen, had been resolved with miraculous rapidity and completeness. "Revolution" in Ulster, on which the Germans had so fondly banked, vanished as effectually as if it had never raised its head. "We will ourselves defend the coasts of Ireland," declared John Redmond in the House of Commons in a speech which will never die, "and I say to the Government that they may to-morrow withdraw every one of their troops from Ireland." Mrs. Pankhurst, freshly released from a periodical hunger-striking sojourn in Brixton jail, announced that the suffragettes had stacked arms and now knew only womankind’s duty to England. That sent another Berlin dream careening into oblivion. "His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition" proclaimed in Parliament through the mouth of the Conservative leader, Bonar Law, that the Government’s political opponents were prepared to accord it "unhesitating support." In the Government itself the "Potsdam Party," as that relentless iconoclast, Leo Maxse, long termed the coterie which was for peace with Germany at almost any price, was either weeded out or suppressed. Lord Morley, the Lord President of the Council; "Honest John" Burns, still true to convictions, President of the Local Government Board, and Charles P. Trevelyan, Parliamentary Secretary of the Board of Education, unobtrusively retired from Mr. Asquith’s official family in consequence of their inability to sanction the war. They have played their parts meantime with honorable consistency--by maintaining an hermetical silence on questions of the war. And finally, though primarily in popular judgment, Lord Haldane, the graduate of Göttingen, the translator of Schopenhauer and the admirer of German _Geist_, was driven by scandalized public opinion from the War Office,