pick apples off a tree. But we never dream of looking for them. We have
a wonderful plan of choosing our leaders, the plan which we call an
election. Five hundred men assemble in a hall and listen to a speech
from a partisan, while five hundred others in a hall in the next street
are cheering a second partisan who declaims against the first. There is
no test of either speaker, except that he must be rich enough to pay
the expenses of an "election." The voters do not even listen to both
partisans in order to judge between them. Thus we choose our members of
Parliament. Our Government is a committee of some twenty of them. Its
first business is to keep its authority against the other party, of
which in turn the chief function is to make out that everything the
Government does is wrong. This is the only recognised plan for leading
the nation.

You may be shocked as you read this by the plainness of my words, but
you know them to be true, though you suppose that to insist on the facts
is "impracticable" because you fancy that there is no way out of the
marvellously absurd arrangements that exist. But there is a way out,
though it is no royal road. It is this. Get the meaning of the nation
into your own head and then make a present to England of your party
creed. Ask yourself what is the one thing most needed now, and the one
thing most needed for the future. You will answer, because you know it
to be true, that the one thing most needed now is to get the navy right.

The one thing most needed for the future is to put the idea of the
nation and the will to help England into every man's soul. That cannot
be done by writing or by talking, but only by setting every man while
he is young to do something for his country. There is one way of
bringing that about. It is by making every citizen a soldier in a
national army. The man who has learned to serve his country has learned