Armistice not to use our power for the purpose of preventing the due feeding of Germany, we continue for months a blockade which, even by the testimony of our own officials, creates famine conditions and literally kills very many of the children. At the beginning of the War, our statesmen, if not our public, had some rudimentary sense of the economic unity of mankind, of our need of one another's work, and the idea of blockading half a world in time of dire scarcity would have appalled them. Yet at the Armistice it was done so light-heartedly that, having at last abandoned it, they have never even explained what they proposed to accomplish by it, for, says Mr Maynard Keynes. 'It is an extraordinary fact that the fundamental economic problem of a Europe starving and disintegrating before their eyes, was the one question in which it was impossible to arouse the interest of the Four.'[75] At the beginning of the War we invoked high heaven to witness the danger and anomaly of autocratic government in our day. We were fighting for Parliamentary institutions, 'open Covenants openly arrived at.' After victory, we leave the real settlement of Europe to be made by two or three Prime Ministers, rendering no account of their secret deliberations and discussions to any Parliament until, in practice, it is too late to alter them. At the beginning of the War we were profoundly moved by the wickedness of military terrorism; at its close we employ it--whether by means of starvation, blockade, armed negro savages in German cities, reprisals in Ireland, or the ruthless slaughter of unarmed civilians in India--without creating any strong revulsion of feeling at home. At the beginning of the War we realised that the governmental organisation of hatred with the prostitution of art to 'hymns of hate' was vile and despicable. We copied that governmental organisation of hatred, and famous English authors duly produce _our_ hymns of hate.[76] We felt at the beginning that all human freedom was menaced by the German theory of the State as the master of man and not as his instrument, with all that means of political inquisition and repression. When some of its worst features are applied at home, we are so indifferent to the fact that we do not even recognise that the thing against which we fought has been imposed upon ourselves.[77] Many will dissent from this indictment. Yet its most important item--our indifference to the very evils against which we fought--is something upon which practically all witnesses testifying to the state of public opinion to-day agree. It is a commonplace of current discussion of present-day feeling. Take one or two at random, Sir Philip Gibbs and Mr. Sisley Huddleston, both English journalists. (I choose journalists because it is their business to know the nature of the public mind and spirit.) Speaking of the wholesale starvation, unimaginable misery, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, Mr. Huddleston writes:--