The song applied precisely to conditions in this country in midsummer, 1914. Englishmen "didn’t want to fight"--abroad, at least, for they were looking forward to cooling their belligerent ardor nearer home, in Ireland. But when the violation of Belgium resolved all dissension in the British Government on the question of intervention in a conflict which, up to then, concerned purely the Dual and Triple Alliances, and literally dragged Britain into the vortex in the name of both her honor and interest, Englishmen did want to fight. Taking quick stock of their resources, they felt assured, in McDermott’s immortal words, that they had "got the men, the ships, and the money, too." But men, ships and money, vital as they are, are useless without leaders, and it was natural that Britons’ first thoughts, in the dawn of the Empire’s supreme emergency, should be concerned with the personnel of the helmsmen. A super-crisis calls insistently for super-men, and in the midst of an era which cynics call the age of mediocrities doubts were not few that England might find herself fatally lacking in a plight as stupendous as any Pitt, Nelson and Wellington had ever faced. With their astonishing capacity to stifle domestic controversy and party bickerings on the threshold of a foreign crisis, Englishmen decided that the first essential was to repose implicit confidence in the existing Government. Ireland, Labor, Suffragettes, Opposition, the four thorns in the Asquith Administration’s side, withdrew, leaving the cleavage they once made so completely healed that hardly a scar remained. The Liberal Cabinet, admittedly stale with nearly a decade of uninterrupted power, might not contain all the talents of statesmanship essential for the conduct of a struggle on whose issue hung Imperial existence. It was a Government overweighted with "tired lawyers," consisting (with the exception of Lord Kitchener) of exclusively professional politicians, and even tinged in important directions (like Lord Haldane) with confessed Germanophilism. It was a Government long and openly charged by its foes with desiring office at any cost and placing the perpetuation of its hold on the fleshpots before any other interest. It was a Government which had avowedly temporized with the Irish yesterday and the Labor Party to-day as the price of maintaining its Parliamentary existence. It was finally a Government notoriously consisting of rival internal factions best typified by the aristocratic Imperialism of Sir Edward Grey on the one hand and on the other by the rugged and radical Democracy of Mr. Lloyd-George. Yet the nation, in the presence of peril palpably incalculable, relegated its criticisms, its doubts and its carpings, and with one voice agreed that "Trust the Government!" must be the slogan of the hour. The Anglo-Saxon spirit of Fair Play asserted itself. The country said that the Asquith Administration must be given a chance to exhibit its mettle.