most portentous political discovery of the
twentieth century--that the power involved in their control over the
necessaries of life, as compared with the power of the voting franchise,
was as a forty-two centimetre cannon to the bow and arrow. The end
sought to be attained, namely the nationalization of the basic
industries, and even the control of the foreign policy of Great Britain,
vindicated the truth of the British Prime Minister's statement that
these great strikes involved something more than a mere struggle over
the conditions of labour, and that they were essentially seditious
attempts against the life of the State.[5]

[Footnote 5: I am here speaking of the conditions of 1920. I appreciate
the great improvement, which seems to me to justify the Lincoln-like
patience of Lloyd George.]

Nor were they altogether unsuccessful; for, when the armies of Lenin and
Trotsky were at the gates of Warsaw, in the summer of 1920, the attempts
of the Governments of England and Belgium to afford assistance to the
embattled Poles were paralysed by the labour groups of both countries,
who threatened a general strike if those two nations joined with France
in aiding Poland to resist a possibly greater menace to Western
civilization than has occurred since Attila and his Huns stood on the
banks of the Marne.

Of greater significance to the welfare of civilization is the complete
subversion during the world war of nearly all the international laws
which had been slowly built up in a thousand years. These principles, as
codified by the two Hague Conventions, were immediately swept aside in
the fierce struggle for existence, and civilized man, with his liquid
fire and poison gas and his deliberate; attacks upon undefended cities
and their women and children, waged war with the unrelenting ferocity of
primitive times.

Surely, this fierce war of extermination, which caused the loss of three
hundred billion dollars in property and thirty millions of human lives,
did mark for the time being the "twilight of civilization." The hands on
the dial of time had been put back--temporarily, let us hope and pray--a
thousand years.

Nor will many question the accuracy of the second count in Pope
Benedict's indictment. The war to end war only ended in unprecedented
hatred between nation and nation, class and class, and man and man.
Victors and vanquished are involved in a common ruin. And if in this
deluge of blood, which has submerged the w