had mattered no longer mattered. The Arming of Ulster and the
Nationalists, Votes for Women, Easier Divorce, the Craze for Night
Clubs--had any of these questions any meaning now? A truce was
called by the men who had been inflaming the people's passion to the
point of civil war. The differences of political parties seemed futile and
idiotic now that the nation itself might be put to the uttermost test of
endurance by the greatest military power in Europe. In fear, as well as
with a nobler desire to rise out of the slough of the old folly of life,
the leaders of the nation abandoned then-feuds. Out of the past
voices called to them. Their blood thrilled to old sentiments and old
traditions which had seemed to belong to the lumber-room of history,
with the moth-eaten garments of their ancestors. There were no
longer Liberals or Conservatives or Socialists, but only Englishmen,
Scotsmen, Irishmen and Welshmen, with the old instincts of race and
with the old fighting qualities which in the past they had used against
each other. Before the common menace they closed up their ranks.


3


Yet there was no blood-lust in England, during those days of July.
None of the old Jingo spirit which had inflamed great crowds before
the Boer War was visible now or found expression. Among people of
thoughtfulness there was a kind of dazed incredibility that this war
would really happen, and at the back of this unbelief a tragic
foreboding and a kind of shame--a foreboding that secret forces were
at work for war, utterly beyond the control of European democracies
who desired to live in peace, and a shame that civilization itself, all
the ideals and intellectual activities and democratic progress of