Where no imagination is required, the English are a kindly race who find it easier and more congenial to forget than to inflict punishment even when it is deserved, even when the criminal unpunished becomes a model for future crime. Every murderer may be sure of his petition for reprieve; in the excitement of the present an Englishman will always forget the excitement of the past, even when this shortness of memory leaves a debt unpaid. The war is so long over, its later stages were so different from the earlier that few now remember their obligation to Lord Kitchener in those first months. It is for soldiers and statesmen to decide whether he outlived his own usefulness, whether he reduced the War Office to chaos, even whether the new armies would not have been formed without the inspiration of his name; others may be grateful to an imagination and a courage that led him to warn the country that he was preparing for a three years' war, when the country was wondering whether war on such a scale could possibly drag on after Christmas. Those who were then living on the remote fringe of the war may recall the indefinable sense of security which was brought by the news that he had been appointed secretary of state for war. More quickly forgotten than anything else in these days was the nation's debt of gratitude to Lord Haldane for reorganising the army and for preparing, in the expeditionary force, the finest fighting weapon in recorded history. His admiration for Germany, his visits to the Kaiser and his study of German methods led a people which prided itself on its dogged common-sense to charge him with treacherous German sympathies; political opponents, eager enough before the party truce to discredit the ministry by destroying one of its most prominent members, encouraged the belief that Lord Haldane, while in temporary charge of the war office, had obstructed the mobilisation of the expeditionary force; and the man who had made the new model army was credited with designs on the country which it saved. When once it is recognised that the English, in their present credulity and ignorance, are unfit for self-government, these aberrations become easily intelligible; it is not so easy to understand or to justify the action of Lord Haldane's colleagues who, for all their worthless moral support and for all their entreaties that he should remain in the cabinet, allowed him to be sacrificed to popular clamour without raising a voice or stirring a finger to protect him publicly.[27]