Of course, it seems natural enough now that the British public should be united in matters of national and imperial import; but those whose memories are long enough will bear me out in saying that in previous elections nine voters in ten had been guided, not by any question of the needs of the country or the Empire, but by their support of this party or of that, of this colour or of that. Our politicians had strenuously supported the preposterous faction system, and fanned party rivalry in every way, because they recognized that it gave them personal power and aggrandizement, which they had long placed before any consideration of the common weal. By this they had brought shame and disaster upon the nation, in precisely the same manner that the same results had been produced by the same means, when these were used by the oligarchs of the Dutch Republic, prior to the downfall of the Netherlands. Indeed, for some time before the invasion our politicians might have been supposed to be modelling their lives and policy entirely upon those of the Dutch Republic in the eighteenth century; particularly with regard to their mercenary spoliation of the nation's defence forces, and their insane pertinacity in clinging to the policy of "cheapness," which killed both the manufacturing and the agricultural industries of the country, by allowing other properly protected nations to oust our producers from all foreign markets, and to swamp our home markets with their surplus stocks. Down to the minutest detail, the same causes and actions had produced the same results a century earlier in the Netherlands; and even as, first, King William of Prussia, and then revolutionary France, had devastated the Netherlands, so had the Kaiser's legions overrun England. It was not for lack of warning that our politicians had blindly followed so fatal a lead. "The Destroyers" were still being warned most urgently at the very time of the invasion by public speakers, and in such lucid works as Ellis Barker's _The Rise and Decline of the Netherlands_. In spite of the emphatically non-party character of _The Citizens'_ campaign, John Crondall kept in close touch throughout with all his political friends, and very many members of Parliament were among our leading workers. My chief's idea was that, when the elections drew near, we should cease to map out our movements in accordance with those of the Canadian preachers, and allow them to be guided by the exigencies of the electoral campaign; bringing all our influence to bear wherever we saw weakness in the cause of patriotism and reform.