“I confess I don’t like the outlook,” I said; and for the life of me I could not imagine how any one enjoyed the prospect of a peace abroad that was nothing but a silent war. My volatile host had been sufficiently dissatisfied a few days before when the labour party, realizing that the government was properly contemptuous of its servile supporters in the House of Commons, threatened the “direct action” of a general strike. Dainton knew; and I knew; and every man with a smattering of economic history knew that the present boom would be followed by a disastrous slump. “Things seem too good to last.” The flow of geniality ran suddenly dry. “You’d be the first to complain if they did,” said Dainton; and his tone surprised me out of a reply till I noticed his flushed face and watery eyes. “My friend George has great qualities,” he continued, with malicious jocularity, to the table at large, “but he’s no great shakes as a prophet. Before the war he told us there would be no war; when it came, he said it could never end one way or the other; now that it’s ended, he says it _must_ start again. Cheerful customer, George.” I might have reminded him that in the nineties he was prophesying an inevitable war with Russia, in the nineteen-hundreds with France. I might have asked him to reconcile the treaty of Versailles with the fourteen points. I might have enquired whether he would keep his promises of the December election that the kaiser should be hanged and the whole cost of the war covered by a German indemnity. In the interests of a quiet dinner, I said nothing; Dainton, as a political barometer, was more valuable to me than Dainton as a political controversialist. I realized for the first time that the class which he represented would be our most aggressive antagonists when we worked to secure a sane peace. Thanks to the determination of the French prime minister and the vacillation of our own, he was enabled to go back impenitently to the mood of his election address. No longer speaking of “Wilson, _le bienvenu_”, he had discovered in the president an insidious agent for strengthening Germany and weakening France. Forgetting his earlier lip-service to the League of Nations, he paraded comparative populations and, in my hearing that night, based his hopes of enduring peace on “bleeding Germany white and keeping her white”.