Blackhampton was in the war from the first moment. Never its custom to do things by halves, this body of clear thinking Britons did its best to rise to the greatest occasion in history. Its best was not enough--nothing human could have been--but as far as it went it was heroic. In the first days of the disaster none could tell its magnitude. Forces had been set in motion whose colossal displacement was beyond human calculation. Something more than buckets of water are required to cope with a prairie fire, but at first there seemed no other means at hand of dealing with it. Within the tentative and narrow scope of the machinery provided by the state wonders were performed in the early weeks of the holocaust. Every bucket the country could boast was called into use, but the flames seemed always to gain in power and fury. From the outset this midland city, like the kingdom itself, betrayed not a sign of panic. In the presence of fathomless danger it remained calm. British nerves lie deep down, and in those first shattering weeks the entire nation stood stolidly to its guns under the threat of night and disruption. The energy shown by Blackhampton in organizing hospitals and in raising men to fill them was truly amazing, yet in this it was no more than the mirror of the whole country. City vied with city, shire vied with shire, in voluntary service to a state, that, no matter what its defects, was able to maintain a sense of proportion which may be claimed as the common measure of the republic. The curious anachronism, magniloquently miscalled the British Empire, rose at once to a moral height without a precedent in the history of the world. It would have been fatally easy in the circumstances of the case for a brotherhood of free peoples to have turned a deaf ear to the voice of honor. The mine was sprung so quickly, the issues at stake were so cunningly veiled, that only "a decent and a dauntless people," unprepared as they were and taken by surprise, would have cast themselves into the breach at an hour's notice, fully alive to the nature of the act and by a divine instinct aware of its necessity, yet without fully comprehending what it involved. Governments and politicians, like books and writers, exist to be criticized, and it is their common misfortune that impudence is now the first function of wisdom. History is not likely to deny the great part played in a supreme moment by certain brave and enlightened men. In the end the mean arts of the party journal will not rob of their need those who have made still possible a decent life.