THE NEW WORLD “With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in: to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves and with all nations.” ABRAHAM LINCOLN, March 4th, 1865. “I DON’T envy the men who have to govern the world after the war,” said M. Clemenceau to Mr. Lloyd George on one occasion in Paris during the Peace Conference. His instinct proved true. For indeed the world, both abroad and in these islands, has proved far less tractable since the guns have ceased to fire. There has been less killing, but more quarrelling. Above all, there has been a great increase of civil contention within the nations, from the extreme of civil savagery that has swept over Russia to the more moderate party contentions which have divided and weakened American effort, and which have, to some extent, distracted this country. From the very beginning Mr. Lloyd George foresaw these troubles, and decisively made up his mind that, for his part, he would work to prolong the national unity achieved during the war. Since November 11th, 1918, he never swerved from his belief that the country could not afford the margin of effort necessary for party contention. Unity has seemed to him as necessary for recovery from the strife as it was for the strife itself. For, consider the situation as it presented itself to the statesmen on the morrow of the Armistice. In every great belligerent European country trade had been entirely dislocated by the strain of the war. Ploughshares had literally been turned into swords. Vast workshops had been diverted to war. Huge populations of men and women had been shifted to munition centres. Now gigantic armies of soldiers and workers had to be demobilised, and over the whole situation hung the peril of unemployment. All the countries were exhausted, physically and mentally; it is not too much to say they were suffering from a modified form of shell-shock. In every great community there were suppressed labour difficulties, the accumulation of grievances that had been held back from expression during the four years of war. Then, underground in both France and Great Britain, there were the fanatics of Bolshevism, working like moles at the roots of society and ready to take advantage of every possible emergency to forward their terrific designs. In England the very police had been shaken in their discipline.