as to outstay our rich ones.

One sees not the least sign that the British people understand this. I
do not know how it is in Australia, but in Britain life runs its normal
course. Gigantic sums flow away daily, and the only efforts at economy
one hears of are a Daylight Saving Act adopted only because Germany
adopted it first; a list of prohibited imports and petty economies,
which we mistook when first we read it for an elaborate satire; and a
pious hope, in the true voluntary and official British style, that meat
would be shunned on two days in the week.

By way of contrast there are dished out for our encouragement reports of
all the pains which the Germans are put to to economise food in their
country. Potatoes instead of flour, meat twice a week, food strictly
regulated by ticket, children taught to count between each mouthful in
order to avoid over-eating. We are supposed to draw comfort from this
contrast.

It is the most depressing literature we have. The obvious comment is,
"Well, there is a nation organised to win a war--that is the sort of
nation which the men in the opposite trenches have behind them. A nation
which has organised itself for war, and is already organising itself for
peace after the war"; and all that we, who are organised neither for war
nor peace, have, in answer to a national effort like that, is an
ignorant jeer at what is really the most formidable of the dangers
threatening us.

If the British Empire took the war as business, were ready to disturb
its daily life, alter its daily habits, to throw on the scrap-heap its
sacred individualism, and do and live for the national cause, no one