Many months had slipped away since we discussed the day of reckoning that awaited an opportunist government and an indifferent country. In the last four months of 1921 and the first eight of 1922 every storm that we had foretold blew against our doors or broke through our roofs. By the time that the peace coalition fell, the great powers were at loggerheads, war was at a day’s remove and the mutter of social revolution was heard in England for the first time since the Chartist riots. No one heeded our jeremiads; and there is little satisfaction now in recalling our prescience. Indeed, before presuming to lecture the public, I might well ask myself what hearing I won from my friends and what attention I paid to my own warnings. Did O’Rane listen when I told him that his stubbornness had already alienated his wife and would, as likely as not, encourage the unemployed to break his windows? Did I listen when I told myself that, though I had sworn to have no scene with Barbara, the armed neutrality could not last? Did I really believe that the conditions created by the Versailles conference could only be changed by another war? 2 I am writing so near to the times which I am trying to describe that I must occasionally invoke the judgement of posterity. I may be told that my facts are wrong, that I have distorted them by unintended omissions, above all that I worked in a false perspective. My only answer must be that I have written the truth as I saw it, that I have no thesis to maintain and that my conclusions have been reached without bias. At the armistice I believed that we had done with war; when peace was signed, I believed that another war was being made inevitable; and, when the peace-coalition fell, I believe that the sense and conscience of the country rose in revolt against a system that threatened it with another war. From this standpoint, the general election of 1922 closed the chapter that began in 1918 and the book that opened in 1914. If it did not answer my question whether the old governing classes could make peace, it gave an unmistakable answer to those who demonstrated that they could not. So far as the people of England are concerned, I feel that the diplomatic moves and counter-moves of this period, the division and regrouping of political parties, the influence of the party and press managers and the historical significance of the Irish settlement or the unemployment problem were all leading to the upheaval of 1922. If history admit of beginnings and ends, a system ended with the end of the 1918 parliament. In using the word “revolt”, which Louis XVI favoured, I wonder whether I should not use the word “revolution”, which de Liancourt substituted.