anted to sustain it? Listen: those fields lie nearer London
than does your little village: men are dying--yes, and women and
little children are being massacred--far nearer London than you are
peacefully sitting at this moment."

"Come!" thought the Vicar, "this fellow is talking sense after all,
and talking it rather well." Mr Rounsell stood up and pointed out
the positions of Liege and Polpier on the wall-map, and their
relative distances from London. A moment later the Vicar frowned
again as Mr Boult launched into a violent--and as it turned out, a
lengthy--invective against the German Emperor; with the foulness of
whose character and designs he had, it seemed, been intimately
acquainted for a number of years. "Who made the War?" "Who had been
planning it and spying for the opportunity to gratify his unbridled
lust of power?" "Who would stand arraigned for it before the awful
tribunal of God?" &c. The answer was "the Kaiser," "the Kaiser,"
"the Kaiser Wilhelm"--Mr Boult pronounced the name in German and
threw scorn into it.

--"Which," mused the Vicar, "is an argument _ad invidiam_; and, when
one comes to think of it, rather a funny one. The man is still
talking sense, though: only I wish he'd talk it differently."

Then for a quarter of an hour Mr Boult traced the genesis of the War,
with some ability but in special-pleader style and without a particle
of fairness. He went on to say that he, personally, was not in
favour of Conscription. [As a matter of fact he had spoken both for
and against Compulsory Service on many public platforms.] He believed
in the Voluntary Principle: and looking on the many young men
gathered in the body of the hall, and more particularly at the back
["excellent material" he called them, too], he felt convinced there
would be no hanging back that night; but to-morrow, or, rather,
Monday, when he returned to London he would be able to report that
the heart of Polpier was sound and fired with a resolve to serve our
common country. Mr Boult proceeded to make the Vicar writhe in his
seat by a jocular appeal to "the young ladies in the audience" not to
walk-out with any young man until he had clothed himself in khaki.
He wound up with one of his most effective perorations, boldly
enlisting John Bright and the Angel of Death; and sat down amid
tumultous applause. It takes all sorts to make a world, and this
kind of speech.

Farmer Best called upon the Vicar.

"I wish," said M