ht literally be said in 1900 that the Whig Party and
the Tory Party came to Parliament in a hansom cab. It was not a case of
two towers rising into different roofs or spires, but founded in the
same soil. It was rather the case of an arch, of which the
foundation-stones on either side might fancy they were two buildings;
but the stones nearest the keystone would know there was only one. This
"two-handed engine" still stood ready to strike, not, indeed, the other
part of itself, but anyone who ventured to deny that it was doing so. We
were ruled, as it were, by a Wonderland king and queen, who cut off our
heads, not for saying they quarrelled but for saying they didn't. The
libel law was now used, not to crush lies about private life, but to
crush truths about public life. Representation had become mere
misrepresentation; a maze of loopholes. This was mainly due to the
monstrous presence of certain secret moneys, on which alone many men
could win the ruinous elections of the age, and which were contributed
and distributed with less check or record than is tolerated in the
lowest trade or club. Only one or two people attacked these funds;
nobody defended them. Through them the great capitalists had the handle
of politics, as of everything else. The poor were struggling hopelessly
against rising prices; and their attempts at collective bargaining, by
the collective refusal of badly-paid work, were discussed in the press,
Liberal and Tory, as attacks upon the State. And so they were; upon the
Servile State.

Such was the condition of England in 1914, when Prussia, now at last
armed to the teeth and secure of triumph, stood up before the world, and
solemnly, like one taking a sacrament, consecrated her campaign with a
crime. She entered by a forbidden door, one which she had herself
forbidden--marching upon France through neutralised Belgium, where every
step was on her broken word. Her neutralised neighbours resisted, as
indeed they, like ourselves, were pledged to do. Instantly the whole
invasion was lit up with a flame of moral lunacy, that turned the
watching nations white who had never known the Prussian. The statistics
of non-combatants killed and tortured by this time only stun the
imagination. But two friends of my own have been in villages sacked by
the Prussian march. One saw a tabernacle containing the Sacrament
patiently picked out in pattern by shot after shot. The other saw a
rocking-horse and the wooden toys i