Bertrand’s outburst was followed by a long silence; and, as he chewed his moustache and gathered strength, I fancied that he might be reflecting how much he had aged since we incubated the Disarmament League in Princes Gardens and hatched _Peace_ out of a grimy office in Bouverie Street. “You give this lot five years, sir?,” asked O’Rane. “Unless they blunder into a new war before then,” Bertrand answered; “or unless we can make an opposition strong enough to break them.” As he swung round on me, I pointed out that he was forming an opposition before he had anything tangible to oppose. “We must _shape_ the peace!,” he cried. “I give you till to-night to make up your mind! If you desert me, George, I shall fight single-handed. And I’m getting too old for that. Where’s Barbara? I must explain what’s expected of her.” I capitulated without even taking my hours of grace. When Bertrand stumped indoors, I knew he was going to depict a shattered and mutinous army of liberals rallying to our exhortations and reconciled by Barbara’s diplomacy. I knew, further, that, outside the pages of a woman’s novel, politics never had been so theatrically arranged. Lord Crawleigh might dine with his daughter, but he would never vote with his son-in-law. Frank Jellaby and the independent liberals might, if we caught them unawares, maintain a civil front to the coalition-liberals, but they would never serve in the same administration as the men whom they charged with stabbing them in the back. None of this, however, was likely to influence Barbara in her present mood of exaltation. “Liberalism,” said my uncle in one of his fine, vague phrases, “is greater than the liberal party.” “In the present state of the liberal party,” I answered, “that would not be difficult. But you don’t _believe_ you’re going to make a new party of any kind.” Bertrand shook his head mournfully and sat with the far-away expression of an old and tired man who had sampled in his time the liberalism of Mazzini and Lincoln, Bright and Cobden, Bradlaugh and Chamberlain, Gladstone and Asquith. “If we can bring liberalism back to life,” he sighed, “a party will form without our help: all we need is a rallying-point. I mean something bigger than electoral reform and tariff squabbles, George: I mean a liberal spirit in politics. At the beginning, I should have called this a liberal war. When Wilson aimed at a peace that should leave nobody too strong, nobody too much broken, I called that a liberal spirit. I wrote to you about the glacial age of materialism, because a liberal spirit is the only thing that can melt it. Every individual, every country will fight for its own hand: it’s instinctive, like food-hoarding in 1914. Does Lucien care if Russia’s starving? Does van Oss care if England’s crippled with debt? Does any one care if the majority get less than the best out of life? Devil take the hindmost! That’s the spirit we have to fight.”