They were the high privates, these human ostriches, of the Grand Army of Truth-Hiders, who, commanded by great editors in Fleet Street and ably abetted by the Censorship, preferred palatable fiction to iron facts. It is they who kept John Bull lulled in complacent slumber for most of the first year of the war and are doing their diabolical best to administer sleeping-powder even now. Yet, by and large, the section of the British public which does its thinking above its gaiter-tops was effectually roused from its dreams as Armageddon’s initial twelvemonth approached its finish. It was the sub-stratum which could not be roused from the stupor of indifference. The war had brought mourning and desolation to the upper-class homes of England. The havoc wrought in the ranks of the peerage and other dignities is poignantly summarized in the new _Debrett_. Ten per cent. of the British officers who have died in the war were in the pages of _Debrett’s Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage and Companionage_, and in the issue for 1916, just published, the War Roll of Honor of the dead comprises eight hundred names. In it appear one member of the Royal Family--Prince Maurice of Battenberg; six peers, sixteen baronets, six knights, and seven members of Parliament, one hundred sixty-four knights companion, ninety-five sons of peers, eighty-two sons of baronets, and eighty-four sons of knights. Two successive heirs to the earldom of Loudoun fell, and the death of Lord Worsdey affected the succession to three separate peerages, the earldom of Yarborough and the baronies of Fauconberg and Conyers. Succession has been unduly precipitated, or the normal descent changed, in over one hundred instances by the casualties of the war. The peer, the professional man, or the merchant, had had an almost annihilating blow struck at his fortune. Things during the past year had dealt these classes a vicious thrust. But working-class and lower-class Britain were actually profiting from the war. Wages were inordinately high--despite trade-unionism’s unceasing clamor. Unemployment no longer existed. There were no soup-kitchens along the Embankment. The Salvation Army’s poor-relief system was almost without an excuse. Families of clerks and working men--many thousands of whom were volunteers in Kitchener’s armies--were, thanks to generous separation allowances paid by the War Office, almost better off than in the days when the bread-winner was at home. For the British proletariat Mars seemed almost a savior. He had brought it unwonted prosperity. The temper in which a vast portion of the "downtrodden" looked upon their new-born affluence was that self-preservation, being the first law of nature, insistently demanded nothing from them which would precipitately evict them from Easy Street. The Grand Fleet protected lower-class England from the only blow which could conceivably have knocked sense into it--invasion. As that did not and could not occur,