On May 21 Lord Northcliffe’s _Daily Mail_--his critics are fond of calling _The Times_ the "penny edition" of _The Daily Mail_--opened a ruthless fire on Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, as the man directly responsible for the high-explosive famine which was paralyzing British military effort. England was plastered with flaming placards reading: "Kitchener’s Tragic Blunder." With the journalistic instinct for a catch-phrase, Northcliffe christened the situation "The Shells Tragedy." He hammered home mercilessly the theory that England must hold to accountability the man whom the country had entrusted with practically autocratic control of the War Office. He insisted that Kitchener could not take shelter behind a brilliant past. It was a bold throw for the Bonaparte of British newspaperdom. He was not only assailing the man whom he himself had helped to elevate to the War Secretaryship; he was attacking the national idol. To the overwhelming majority of Englishmen, as I have already pointed out, the name of Kitchener spelled confidence. Next to the Fleet, he represented the country’s greatest war asset. Whenever Britons doubted whether the course of events was leading to victory, they thought of the navy and of Kitchener, and were of stout heart. Northcliffe knew and understood all this--none better. But he said to himself that the relief of the shells crisis was of vastly more moment than the prestige of a national idol; that if the vital interests of the country demanded the dragging of Kitchener from his pedestal, there must be no hesitation in performing that unpleasant task. In an editorial article which stirred Great Britain to its uttermost foundations, _The Daily Mail_ went full tilt to the issue. It reminded Englishmen that Lord Kitchener loomed large in the public eye primarily as an organizer of victory against the Sudanese and as a man who had "helped" Lord Roberts in South Africa, though (it recalled) there were men who knew Roberts’ private opinions of Kitchener’s achievements in the Boer campaign. Kitchener had also been Commander-in-Chief in India and, until the outbreak of war, was engaged in the comparatively easy task of running the Egyptian machine, whose wheels had been so well oiled by Lord Cromer. Northcliffe was well aware that Kitchener, owing to his long absence in the East, where he had spent the greater part of his life, was not in touch with the democracy at home, nor had Lord Kitchener ever pretended to any such knowledge. _The Daily Mail_ admitted all these things and declared moreover that it was fair to Kitchener to say that he had been thrust at a moment’s notice into a position of immense difficulty. No longer in his first youth, and more than twice the age of successful military commanders of one hundred years ago, Kitchener had been put in charge of the raising, drilling, clothing, equipping, arming, feeding and _fighting_ of an army which had to be manufactured at a speed