Looking back on my two years’ labours in Fetter Lane, I feel that the first six months were given to creating an atmosphere. As Bertrand proclaimed at our inaugural dinner, no lasting peace could be established on a sense of grievance; and, until the terms of peace were published, we tried to deflect public attention from crude thoughts of triumph and cruder hankerings after revenge to a frank desire for mutual forgiveness and good-will. For twelve months after the treaty was placed in our hands, we laboured to demonstrate that it was unworkable. And in the six months during which the peace coalition was tottering to the fall I received my answer to the old question whether those who could neither keep peace nor make war were competent to make peace. “It won’t do,” Bertrand declared summarily, when we met to discuss our public attitude to the treaty of Versailles. “‘Revision’ must be our battle-cry. Revision of the treaty.” I fancy I was expressing what Spence-Atkins and Triskett and all of us had long felt, when I said: “Thank God we have a battle-cry at last.” “It will not be popular,” predicted my uncle, with his usual love for being in a minority. “The fools who shouted that we were ‘letting the Hun off’ will shout more than ever that we’re making the treaty ‘a scrap of paper’. . . . And yet, if we try to enforce it, all central Europe will go the way of Russia.” “I’m afraid it will be another unpopular cry,” added Jefferson Wright, “but it’s time we drew attention to the economic position at home. We’re pouring out money as though the war were still going on.” “Our battle-cry, then,” said Bertrand, “must be ‘Produce more and consume less’.” “We shall be told we’re trying to enslave labour. And there’ll be no end to unemployment when the ‘consuming less’ begins.” “We’re here to tell people the truth, even if it’s an unpleasant truth,” Bertrand rejoined with stern virtue; and our shorthand-writer looked up encouragingly to see if this also was to be a battle-cry. Then, as Wright and Spence-Atkins had been given their orders, he packed me out of the office to collect material for six articles on _England in Reconstruction_. “The great pulse of the people,” he ordained as my objective. “London’s a hot-house: abnormal.” 2 My last duty, before taking the road, was to attend little Ivy Maitland’s wedding.