brought all its forces into play. When, in 1887, Lord Iddesleigh,
{130} superseded at last, fell dead in Lord Salisbury's waiting-room,
the latter, writing to Lord Randolph Churchill, exclaimed, 'As I looked
upon the dead man before me I felt that politics was a cursed
profession.' And Lord Salisbury knew.

The party politician, even in the maelstrom of a world's devastation,
pursued his familiar course. Before the war he failed to warn the
nation and to prepare. In the midst of the war he still strove to keep
the nation in the dark. After months of calamities the nation was told
that all was going well, and the people were obsessed with the idea
that final victory was at hand. If the people only knew their peril
they would have made any sacrifice for their country and their homes.
But they were not told. And the party politician shrank from demanding
or enforcing a sacrifice which the nation did not realise to be
necessary because of its ignorance. The policy of pusillanimity
pursued before the war was still regnant. The politicians who shrank
{131} from demanding sacrifice in peace, shrank from demanding it in
war. They did not know the heart of the nation. There was no
sacrifice the nation would have shrunk from, if the demand were made.
The nation knew that it needed discipline, and it asked for discipline,
but asked in vain. And to-day the same pusillanimous policy sacrifices
prohibition to the fear that the munition-workers might give trouble.
They knew not, and they know not, the heart of this nation. But the
fact remains that to-day the nation is spending 180 millions or so a
year on alcohol, while the Government calls on the people to exercise
the greatest economy that the war may be waged to the end. It is a sad
and strange spectacle.

II

It was fortunate for the cause of the world's freedom that there was
found in Europe a great nation which was not under the sway of party
politicians. {132} The German Emperor is reported to have said that
the next great European war would be won by the most sober nation.
When the war began and the Tsar issued his great rescript abolishing
vodka the Emperor is said to have exclaimed, 'But who could have
foreseen this wonderful coup!' Some day it will doubtless be the
accepted fact that the deliverance of the Russian nation from the
degenerating power of alcohol won the war. For through that great act
of a statesman's prevision the Russian Empire experie