Shepherd’s Bush envisaged war not as an unmixed evil, but as something better, somehow, than peace had ever been. It is all woefully at loggerheads with Norman Angell’s theories of the "devastating economic influence of war." But the immutable fact is that working-class Britain, despite the havoc the war has played with trade, incomes and high finance generally, finds itself, despite even the higher cost of living, at least on as prosperous a level as at any time in its contemporary history. It may be a myopic view, but it explains, in my judgment, much of the proletariat’s amazing apathy toward the crucial national emergency. The building of the New England is still in progress. The melting-pot is full. Years will elapse before the finished product leaves the crucible. The process of transition, however, has made enormous strides. Adversity is a wonderful reorganizer. The physiognomy of things long held unchangeable is altered almost beyond recognition. It is a better England already, as well as a new one. Above all, Democracy has not failed in the supreme test. The spectacle of three million men, uncoerced, responsive and responsible to no law but their own conscience, marching out to death and glory that England may live, is a sublime picture, which will blot out and overshadow much of the bungling and many of the disasters and excrescences of the past. If I have seemed to dwell with insistence and even cynicism upon "British calm" amid the thunders, let me here and now subscribe unqualifiedly to the view that it remains, when all is said and done, a magnificent achievement second only to the demonstration of Voluntaryism as a Democracy’s first line of defense. Britannia will continue to rule the waves mainly because she was calm when they surged about her most angrily. CHAPTER XXII QUO VADIS? October, 1915. The eighty-third day of the second year of war. A woman, writing in _The Times_, suggests that England adopt as her national prayer, "God help us win this war." King George V, emerging at length from the No Man’s Land of Constitutional Irresponsibility, appeals, stirringly, "to my people" to save the sinking bark of Voluntary military service. It is the calm before the Conscription storm. The Sovereign discourses upon "the grave moment in the struggle" and calls for "men of all classes to come forward and take their share in the fight in order that another may not inherit the free Empire which their ancestors and mine have built." The King hints at "the darkest moment" which, from time immemorial, "has ever produced in men of our race the sternest resolve."