Since this war began there has been increasing wonder as to why the Government (not only that now in office but the two that preceded it as well) have shown such little understanding of the British workingman. This at least is certain-that their treatment of him has been no more successful, judged by results, than it has been dignified. No doubt the British workingman wants knowing. He has the defects as well as the virtues of his race. In fact, he is British through and through, and the handling of him should therefore present no insoluble problems, no excursions into the unknown, for British statesmanship. Doubtless he is a highly mettlesome steed, who requires horsemanship in the true management of him; but that is exactly the art in which successive Ministers have been con

spicuously lacking. Their manage

ment has rather resembled that of Mr. Winkle on horseback-it has consisted of a total forbearance from control and a nervous anxiety manifested in feeble neck-pattings and endearing apostrophes as to what the creature would do next. It is not surprising if, under such handling, Labor, again like Mr. Winkle's horse, has occasionally shown a disconcerting tendency to "go sideways." Successive Governments have shrunk from telling the workingman, in firm language, just what he must do. Or, rather, Ministers have now and again said that this or that must be done; and

when it came to the point, they have shrunk from seeing that it was done. They have capitulated ignominiously, and have sought escape from the conflict of will by granting an increase of wages or other benefits and exemptions, until the workingman has had every excuse for believing that it was he and not the Government that was in the saddle, and that the orders issued to him were not really dictated by the necessities of the hour. And every failure to insist on what had been demanded has weakened the influence of the Government and made the next exertion of authority more difficult.

That the British workingman is sound at the core is evident enough. Otherwise he would not have remained obdurate to all the incessant machinations to which he has been left exposed, without any effort to check or counteract them. When one reflects on the enormous expenditure of energy and money which has been made by pacifist and syndicalist organizations in their effort to turn British Labor away from its allegiance to the British cause when one considers the needless irritation and the inevitable strain to which Labor has been subjectedthe marvel is not that so much disturbance, but that so little has been achieved. The workingman is just as good a Briton as anyone else. He wants, as much as anyone else, to see his own side win, and he is not in the smallest degree infected with the

good friend and a good fighter; and if he is also inclined to grouse, especially when he is well off, he does not in that respect differ from the British soldier himself, who is, in fact, the workingman in khaki. The picture of him painted by Mr. Ramsay Macdonald and his friends-the picture familiarized by the late Walter Crane's decorative designs-has no relation to fact at all. They would have us believe that the British workingman is a creature who spends all his leisure, after the domestic pieties have been discharged, in reading the Labor Leader and attending I.L.P. lectures, who abhors beer and despises sport, and whose greatest ambition is to clasp some foreign proletarian by the hand and to join with him in singing "The Red Flag." The reality is not like that at all. We know it, to take only one sign, from the circulation of the Labor Leader. The British workingman is one of like passions with ourselves, and with a very decided prepossession for his Own country. Is it to be supposed that he is unmindful that the men who are holding the line in France are for the most part men of his own household and workshop-men that he has lived and worked with all his life, and that he will have to live and work with again? We say that the British workingman is incapable of such treachery to his kind as is contemplated by the promoters of the Stockholm Conference and by the wire-pullers who secured the misrepresentation of his sentiments at the recent Labor Party's Conference. If there has been any indication to the contrary, it has been because the appeal to Labor has been maladroit, and the management of it

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clumsy. Instead of exhortations and coaxings and bribings, it was only necessary to assume that the workers of this country were Britons first and Trade Unionists second; and to act on that assumption firmly and consistently. Nearly all the strikes that have occurred have resulted merely from temper that need never have been aroused. As for questions of Trade Union privileges, the Trade Unionist knows by a sure instinct that their maintenance is in the hands of the armies in France, and not of the mischief-makers at home; and that a German triumph would mean the death-knell of all that organized labor has won for itself through generations of struggle and sacrifice. Mr. Bernard Shaw expressed the heart of the matter very well the other day when he said that there was nothing to discuss at Stockholm. Either Germany would win the war or we should; and if Germany won, she would skin us alive. Apart from the humiliation of being beaten in the fight, the British workingman, no more than anyone else, looks forward to being skinned alive. But above and beyond that, there is his loyalty to his comrades at the frontthe millions of men who are of his own class, and who will one day come back to ask an account of the stewardship of those whom they have left at home. The fighting man is going to make himself felt when he gets back, and it will not be pleasant for such as cannot look him in the face. No, the workingman is sound enough; the fault lies in his managers, who have offered him everything but what he wantedstrong and confident leadership. When his mates come back from the war they will be able to tell something of the value of such leadership.

When the War broke out in the early days of August, 1914, a leading newspaper maintained that the right course for England was to preserve a strict neutrality in the War, and make the belligerents pay her indifferently for the privilege and luxury of fighting it out. The same paper now maintains that it is a mistake to hold on to the end, and that an inconclusive Peace now would pay better than a decisive Peace later on. It has placed a blunderbuss containing these opinions in the hands of our great novelist of today, Mr. H. G. Wells, and he is content to fire it off under the title of "A Reasonable Man's Peace." It is the Peace of a man who knows a great deal about human affairs, and human nature, but who lacks knowledge of the one thing needful-which is human History. Historic synthesis has been the one sense lacking in most of Mr. Wells's brilliant series of historical predictions. The Hon. Theodore Roosevelt seems to us more correct in his diagnosis, when he writes in his Introduction to Mrs. Humphry Ward's new book, "Towards the Goal," that of all the noxious weeds, that flourished rankly in the pre-War period, the most noxious was professional pacificism. "The professional pacifist has at times festered in the diseased tissue of almost every civilization; but it is only within the last three-quarters of a century that he has been a serious menace to the peace of justice and righteousness. In consequence, decent citizens are only beginning to understand the base immorality of his preaching and practice; and he has been given entirely undeserved credit for good intentions. In England as in the United States, domestic pacificism has been the most potent ally of alien militarism."

Common sense forbids that the theory, which to a very large extent engendered the War, shall have a main finger in dictating the terms of Peace. The heresies of this theory, among others, were that Peace was to be had for the asking, that there was nothing specially precarious in the status of small States, and that it was more important to concern ourselves with the pre-occupations of International Trade than those of National Insurance, and more vital to make good customers than good patriots. These theorists overlooked the danger of the arrogance of national superiority linked with a strong insuperable faith in the efficacy of a Grande Armee. The Germans had gone on building up this creed steadily from 1864 to 1914 and with it a scarce credible conviction of the supremacy of Germans in industry, trade, agriculture, science, history, strength, appetite, culture and attractiveness, no less than in arms. We have all been bitten by the same madness, but humor has gradually inoculated us against the worst effects of the poison. With such a robust patient and such a robust creed as that of Germany completely devoid of humor, it is difficult to effect a cure without crippling the subject a little. For, in fact, the case of Prussia, hatched from a cannon ball and with war for a national industry, is a unique one. No one ever lusted for war as Bernhardi and Little Willy have done. Gustavus, Cromwell, Frederick, Napoleon regarded war as a job that had to be fulfilled, but they never lusted after it and looked for "bloody murder" like the Kaiser's General Staff. Wellington hated war and so do most soldiers of forty who have seen their friends killed all around them. And so the pacifist idea of laughing war out of court, denouncing

it as the plaything of a peculiar people called militarists, and pretending that it was a bogey too terrible really to exist can hardly be regarded as anything but a dismal and disastrous failure.

Much tumid talk has thus been developed about the benevolence of democracy, the virtue of the principle of no annexation, the benefits to be derived from Leagues of Peace, and the wickedness of boycotting an unsuccessful belligerent. And with this talk has gone a persistent ignoring of the hitherto unrepresented force of the Army which is winning the War, of the fact that we have had to invoke a large measure of spontaneous militarism to combat the premeditated militarism of our enemies, and that the Press comments and omniscient persiflage which has biased SO many decisions in the past is bound to count for very little in the present. Pacifists in the past have oftentimes been warm advocates of Napoleon in opposition to their native country. In their insistent demand for Peace at once, at almost any cost, we discover them at the present day to have found even stranger bed-fellows among the cynics, who would reduce the decisions of War to a farce; and the international financiers, whose chief preoccupation it is to make history pay. In their anxiety to prevent Europe from bankrupting itself, many of these are anxious to arrive at a modus vivendi with Germany upon almost any terms. They do not want to liquidate Europe, they do not want to rectify Frontiers, they are not in the least anxious about the future of Alsace, the wrongs of Poland, or the rights of Bohemia; the most they would concede would be a moderate indemnity to Belgium, which a little astuteness on the part of the belligerents would enable them to extort from the neutrals, most of them

small and defenseless States who have filled their pockets at the expense of the belligerents. A big Bulgaria would probably to them be the safest solution to the Balkan difficulty, Berlin might surely swallow Byzantium since Russia professes not to want it; they would wink at Bagdad, smile broadly when the restoration of Colonies was mooted, and pooh pooh the idea of France obtaining more than a face-saving slice of Southern Alsace.

But let us, for a moment, look at realities; it is no good being too idealistic at the close of such a War, war with its brutal opportunisms and cruel necessities, a War which has compelled us all to Prussianize to a certain extent. If we can only adopt moderately decent European views, it will be more than any Peace Congress has done heretofore, truer to history, and better after all than either force or quixotism. One fact has emerged, conspicuous for the world to digest in 1918, and that is that England is the cornerstone of the Alliance, the veritable keystone of the arch, without which the structure would dissolve into fragments. The Pact of London is going to be what the Treaty of Chaumont was in 1814, and Balfour will take the place that Metternich did in '14, Clarendon in '56, Bismarck in '78, and he will concern himself very little with the fantastic ideas which agitate the mind of Mr. Wells, such as the internationalization of Africa, the neutralizing of Turkey, and the assuring of the Germans against a universal boycott. Internationalism has always been the dream of small States, from Gentile and Grotius until the present day, and experience of it does not justify optimism. Condominiums in a corner are bad enough; but a a European Board and Concert (absit omen!) to manage all Africa! Why, the

imagination reels! International control of any kind is a difficult and delicate matter at the best. The men who have to exercise it come from foreign States, and are almost certain to be suspicious of one another, for they serve two masters. Each of them represents a nation, whose interests -rather than those of the people he is supposed to look after-are likely to be his first care. Such a plan would provoke more wars than even the future could sustain. The attempt to neutralize Turkey has been the rock against which we have been running our heads for over a century, and the fear of the Germans that they are going to be boycotted is a perfectly unreal one. Think of the knocks and of the insults, both above the belt and below, that we have given and taken from our dearest allies, and consider seriously whether such qualities as the dogged persistence, the positiveness, the energy, the ability, and the massive industry of our enemies of today, are susceptible of being ostracized for long in such a world as that we live in.

The points in debate must surely be more concentrated and more concrete than this. The first is Strasburg, I needn't dilate on this. It is the spectacular grand cross of the whole conflict, and unless we are prepared to hand it over to France as the symbol of victory and chivalry, our coalition will have failed in its supreme object. Antwerp and all that it implies (which is a good deal) goes without saying. Then there is Trieste, which belongs to Italy. Mazzini, one of the most republican and democratic of men in some ways, declares it to be Italy's postern gate. And if Trieste is the postern gate to Italy, Constantinople. is the front door to Russia! It stands first for the age-long crusade, it has cemented the unity of the Muscovite Empire, and then it stands for the

championship of Balkania; it is the predestined capital of the Russian world, and one equipped like Antwerp or Singapore to become one of the commercial centers of the modern world. A country cannot repudiate the idea which has magnetized the whole of its history. The French Revolution began in a similar way by repudiating such conquests-we shall see! But it is obvious that either Germany or Russia is bound to control the Straits. We must look after ourselves at Basra, and as to Africa, the task of securing ultimate interests with due regard to the Union in the South, France in the Northwest and England in the Northeast, will occupy our full attention. Then, without being pedantic about Home Rule, we must do our best for the JugoSlavs, and whatever we can for Bohemia and the Poles. The integrity and impartiality of America should make her an invaluable referee of all these near Eastern questions. The object of a Peace Congress after all is to settle the map of Europe for as long as possible in accordance with the issue that the warriors shall have decided. The nearer such a settlement can approximate the decisions of Mars, the securer it will be. The Congress of 1878, which was mainly effected by non-belligerents, was probably the most cynical and unjust of all European settlements recorded by history. Our suspicions of Russia were then as gross as Germany's of us are today, and the libels as cruel as those of Europe against us during the Boer War.

But to precipitate peace, to "hurry up" negotiations, to hurl paper knives and drive Congress along by strokes of a whip, as Bismarck did in 1878, is sure to be prolific of sorrow. It was somewhat the same in 1763 and 1713, An extreme impatience to finish quickly was most prejudicial to the in