Parliament, as represented by Crawleigh, the services, as represented by his son, the press, as represented by me, were not allowed to know all that was involved in this apparently aimless squabble about distant waterways. “Nobody knows and nobody cares,” Neave cried in ungovernable exasperation. And this was all that I could report in answer to Bertrand’s request for news. “The first shot fires the magazine,” he predicted; “and we know from the Balkan wars that people can fight when they’ve no food and no money. Russia and Hungary will come in search of pickings. One will bring in another.” . . . For once, however, my uncle was at fault. The political instinct of a somnolent people was again expressed by my butler in his favourite formula that another European war would be beyond a joke. “If they can’t do better than that,” he decided, of the coalition ministers, “they’d better let some one else have a try.” I handed on this opinion to Bertrand next day, with the rider that he looked like winning an old bet on the life of the coalition. Before I went north again to bring Barbara back to London, the Lloyd-George government was under sentence; and, had Bertrand been at hand in October to claim his wager, I should have had to entertain him at dinner. 3 Mindful of Lord Saltash’s invitation, I called without delay at the Turf and Stage to hear the latest movements of political parties. Now, as before, there was no one to turn the prime minister out if he could hold his cabinet together; now, as before, the insurgents were thrown into confusion by their cross-divisions. While Rupert Foreditch ran up and down in search of a conservative leader, the centre party counted its big guns. “_It is hard_,” the Lingfield press stated, “_to imagine a conservative administration without Lord Birkenhead, Sir Robert Horne and Mr. Chamberlain, all of whom, it is well known, have promised their allegiance to Mr. Lloyd-George_.”. . . “_Recent events in the near east_,” retorted the Wister papers, “_have signed the death-warrant of the coalition_.”. . . The organs of both parties combined to ignore the existence of liberal ministers; and I judged that the political wire-pullers on all sides were estimating whether the old but awkward conservative organization or the new but efficient coalition would be the harder to split. As I failed to see Saltash, I deduced that the tocsin was either not to ring yet or else had rung already in some other place; and my nearest approach to a party-manager was the trim and ill-informed Frank Jellaby, who demanded without preamble what line my paper would take in the election. “What line are the independent liberals taking?,” I asked in my turn. “And how many seats can you be sure of winning? I’d support the devil himself if he promised a homogeneous majority.”