The communist who seeks to abolish private property has more chance of success than the impatient reformer who tries to sweep away all the ugliness of modern life by breaking the mechanism on which modern life with its ugliness and its beauty depends. It is too late to make an end of industrialism; and man was harder used and more brutalised before the advent of machinery than ever since. His lot is improving daily; and all that the reformer can reasonably ask is that the rate of improvement shall be accelerated until the employer of labour no longer imposes on his work-people conditions that he would himself refuse. In war, a British officer does not order his men into an action which he is himself afraid to undertake; at the end of a march, he does not think of his own needs until he has seen that his men have their food. There is something perilously like shirking in the attitude of an employer who expects men and women to undertake hardships from which he stands aloof; and, directly or indirectly, all are employers. The mission of liberalism will not be fulfilled until it has achieved a form of civilisation whereof no part can inspire misgiving or shame. Every country has its dark places; the inhabitants of every country turn a blind eye to them until the upheaval of war, the outbreak of revolution or the spread of a new faith throws a challenge to every social institution and demands that it shall justify itself. When more than five million men voluntarily risked their lives in defence of one system against another, their decision was less a clean-cut choice than a blend of herd-instinct, collective hypnotism and that irrational feeling for associations which is called patriotism; the decision once taken, they committed themselves to a struggle in which one order of civilisation would probably maintain itself and another would probably be overthrown. If they preserved that which was less good and destroyed that which was more good, they sinned against the light; if they preserved that which was more good, they were still obliged to prove it so much the better that no sacrifice was too great for it; and, if in their scrutiny they discovered blemishes, they were bound to remove them for fear the enemy would say that they had sacrificed themselves for something that was not worth their lives. During the war, of course, every one was too busy to hunt for blemishes and to remove them. After the war every one is too busy; and those who once called themselves liberals have lost interest in everything but the cost of living, though the youngest of them can recall the days when the present prime minister's voice throbbed with emotion in describing the misery of the poor and in championing the outcasts of civilisation, wherever they were to be found. It is more than time for the young liberals of twenty years ago to recognise that the liberal faith has lost its prophets and that the prophets have lost their liberal faith. CHAPTER XIV