None answered him; but, as I waded later through the rhetoric of the election, I felt something of the helplessness that came over me four and a half years earlier, when one telegram after another shewed us that peace was slipping momentarily farther from our reach. The old dispensation could not avert war and could not make war; was this the third panel of my triptych and should we have to admit that the old dispensation could not make peace? We should all of us, I suppose, have been less thrown off our balance, if we had been given the least warning how the election was being conducted. Writing four years afterwards, I seem to be claiming an exceptional wisdom for our criticism at this time: section by section, the electorate that backed the 1918 coalition has withdrawn its support, though my old liberal colleagues made no sign of protest at the time. Little by little, the government itself swallowed its own rash words. The wildest fire-eater says now what Hornbeck and Laurence, O’Rane and I—a sufficiently heterogeneous group!—were saying in the last days of December four years ago. Our views were an accident of geography, for we were living in a political vacuum; an accident of history, too, for in our serious moments we based our expectations on the settlement of Vienna, believing that we in our generation were neither less magnanimous nor more insane than the contemporaries of Castlereagh. “If this is to be the atmosphere of the peace conference . . .” Hornbeck muttered. “These,” I reminded O’Rane, “are the people you’re going to educate up to a civic conscience.” “I must be getting back to London,” was all he would answer. I was reminded irresistibly of a similar party, similarly dispersing in the first days of August four and a half years earlier. We had all said then that we must get back to London; we could none of us have said what we expected to do there. “You’ll wait till Bertrand comes,” I begged. “Yes. I don’t suppose a day or two more or less will make much difference,” said O’Rane. “After all these years, too . . . It’s a curious thing, George; we’re both of us Irishmen, both of us men of peace; and, most of all, we’re reformers. All our working life we’ve seen the reforms nearest our hearts postponed and postponed by an eruption in Ireland or by a threat of European war. God forgive me, I had to stand as a tory and a militarist, because I saw this war coming! Overboard went all my dreams of making life tolerable for the sons of Ishmael! And now again!” I might have added that it was this feeling of futility which kept me from standing again for parliament when I lost my seat in 1910. “Until these same sons of Ishmael strike against war,” I answered, “it’s idle to think of improving their lot.”