If I have emphasized British Labor’s influence in blocking National Service, I must, in all fairness, point out that brows not accustomed to sweat and hands never grimy from toil have joined their frowns and their strength with Trade-Unionism and Socialism against Conscription. The professional pacifists, the "anti-militarists," the statesmen and the newspapers which for years prior to 1914, and even during the weeks immediately preceding August of that year, ridiculed the idea of "war with Germany," were all mobilized against the revolutionary idea of converting able-bodied Britons by law into defenders of the realm. From these quarters the men who have dared to advocate Conscription have been besmirched with abuse no less torrential than that which was heaped upon them at the Trade-Union Congress in Bristol or from week to week in the columns of Socialist-Labor organs. It will not be only certain famous proletariat leaders who prevented Britain from rising in the great war to her full military stature--if prevented she be--but the party-hack editors, authors and anything-for-office politicians who preferred the fetish of "our unenslaved Democracy" and "Voluntaryism" to the system under which _every other single one of Britain’s Allies_ is fighting and under which, if the opinion of professional soldiers is to be trusted, victory alone can be made to perch on the Union Jack. CHAPTER XX THE EMPIRE OF HATE Though the end of the carnage is not even approximately in sight, a synoptic view of Germany in war-time is feasible to a more comprehensive extent than is possible in Britain. Armageddon found the Fatherland completely caparisoned for war, with her people so steeped in discipline that it was the merest formality to harness their peace-time habits to Mars’ Juggernaut and drive the entire nation to battle as one would a well-trained team. "Team-work," in fact, exactly describes Germany’s war-time performances. They are achievements in national unison without parallel in history. Britain, on the other hand, having been overtaken by war, except for her navy, in a state of naked unpreparedness, was plunged forthwith into the melting-pot. Traditions, customs, institutions, hobbies, prejudices, fetishes, even cherished laws, had to be abandoned, upset or reconstructed to fit a world of iron conditions unsuited to a dreamland of comfortable theories. The remaking of Britain, after sixteen months of war, is not yet ended. It has, indeed, hardly commenced. The time to write an accurate history of these isles during the Great Test will come not when peace is signed, but perhaps a decade later, when the New England will have begun to assume, in misty outline at least, the physical, moral and intellectual dimensions in which war, with its scars and its cleansings, left her.