And this, I take it, was the attitude of all who had even a smattering of modern history. From the moment when I warned Barbara that we should perhaps never again be able to call our souls our own, I realized that the armistice had ended nothing but the long business of killing. The victors would now contend for the fruits of their victory, as Russians, Prussians and British had contended in the Congress of Vienna; the vanquished would struggle to preserve in defeat all that compassion, adroitness and obstinacy could secure them, as Talleyrand had struggled for France after Waterloo. The alliance, if it was like any other of modern times, would be strained and perhaps broken in the first weeks of peace, as after our wars with Louis XIV and Napoleon. We should hear men speaking, as de Grammont and Hornbeck already spoke, of “the next war”. Any one who was concerned to avert that must be prepared for a continued effort in which he might truly be unable to call his soul his own. 2 Such energy or ability as I possess were ready to be thrown into the common stock. I had told Philip Hornbeck that the war would have been fought to no purpose if we failed to discover a means of preventing future wars. My difficulty was to know where my own very moderate ability and energy were to be applied. The leading articles and public speeches of these days, taking their time from President Wilson, were familiarizing the idea of a league of nations. Neither speech nor article, however, made clear how the league could be helped to birth by the good-will of insignificant, isolated individuals. I debated with Bertrand whether I should stand again for parliament; but my radicalism from 1906 to 1910 was too strong for the taste of Frank Jellaby and the other liberal whips; it would be repugnant now to every section of an assembly that had sunk party divisions and was aiming at an agreed peace. Very much as Bishop Blougram counselled Gigadibs to “overhaul theology”, my uncle suggested sardonically that I should examine the creeds which I had been professing for the last quarter of a century and see how much of them the war had left. He did not, however, urge my returning to the House; and, if the outbreak of war had justified him in discontinuing our propaganda in _Peace_, the end of the war was hardly the occasion for resurrecting it. “I’m more completely out of a job than any of you,” I told Hornbeck when my old colleagues at the Admiralty entertained me to a farewell dinner on my last night in England. “An obsolete political editor . . .” “Lucky man!,” he sighed enviously. “I’ve been warned for duty when the peace conference opens. And, after that, I’m to convert the intelligence department here to peace uses. Beating swords into plough-shares; and what not.”