One inquires how it is that a generation which boasts of its wisdom and humanity can retain this worst survival of barbarism, and one finds that the evil is connected with a dozen other evils and protected by a general mental debility. The habit of tracing this calamity to the peculiar criminality of another nation, and dwelling only on our own heroism and self-sacrifice in meeting this menace, is in itself a very grave danger. We may be entirely certain that, as long as we retain the military machinery for settling quarrels, there will be wars. How came the machinery to linger amongst us in the twentieth century? At once we light upon a dozen other disorders of our life. This remissness in civilising international intercourse argues a grave indifference to a most important task on the part of our political servants, and an equally grave absence of pressure and direction on the part of their supporters. It reveals a dangerously slovenly condition of our industrial world, a very serious defect in our educational system, a standing menace in the encouraged thoughtlessness of the mass of our people, a general flabbiness, haziness, and anæmia of what may be called the intellectual part of our public life. This is true of all nations,--it may be the turn of the United States, or Norway, or Argentina tomorrow,--but it is most seriously true of England. Do not let us fuddle our minds with the kind of rhetoric one addresses to schoolboys. We have, in the first year of the war, betrayed a sluggishness, a lack of foresight and initiative, a feebleness of organisation, which ought to sober any race, however wealthy. Our Government knew, or ought to have known, since the spring of 1912, that just this war was threatening us; and, when it occurred, they made a virtue of the fact that we were "the least prepared nation in Europe." They took nine months to begin to organise our resources, or to perceive that it was necessary to do so. Plainly, there is something profoundly, comprehensively wrong with our public life. We shall "muddle through," because we have the resources, and because the Allies outnumber their opponents by fifty per cent. But if in a future war we are compelled to face a numerically equal opponent, England will, if she retains these faults, see her royal standard in the dust. As it is, the cost of our ineptitude will be prodigious.