cial and industrial
businesses? The secret does not lie in State employment. There is plenty
of discontent and unrest among the State-employed railway men and
munition workers. It lies rather in the habit of mutual help and mutual
trust. If any civilian employer of labour wants to have willing
workpeople, let him take a hint from the Army. Let him live with his
workpeople, and share all their dangers and discomforts. Let him take
thought for their welfare before his own, and teach self-sacrifice by
example. Let him put the good of the nation before all private
interests; and those whom he commands will do for him anything that he
asks.

I cannot believe that the benefits which have come to us from the Army
will pass away with the passing of the War. Those who have been comrades
in danger will surely take with them something of the old spirit into
civil life. And those who have kept clear of the Army in order to carry
on their own trades and businesses will surely realize that they have
missed the great opportunity of their lives.

In a wider sense the War has brought us to an understanding of one
another. This great Commonwealth of independent nations which is called
the British Empire is scattered over the surface of the habitable globe.
It embraces people who live ten thousand miles apart, and whose ways of
life are so different that they might seem to have nothing in common.
But the War has brought them together, and has done more than half a
century of peace could do to promote a common understanding. Hundreds of
thousands of men of our blood who, before the War, had never seen this
little island, have now made acquaintance with it. Hundreds of thousands
of the inhabitants of this island to whom the Dominions were strange,
far places, if, after the War, they should be called on to settle there,
will not feel that they are leaving home. I can only hope that the
Canadians and Anzacs think as well of us as we do of them. We do not
like to praise our friends in their hearing, so I will say no more than
this: I am told that a new kind of peerage, very haughty and very
self-important, has arisen in South London. Its members are those
house-holders who have been privileged to have Anzac soldiers billeted
on them. It is private ties of this kind, invisible to the
constitutional lawyer and the political historian, which make the fine
meshes of the web of Empire.

Because he knew that the strength of the whole texture depe