t
Louis XIV. Our trial is on us; and if we cannot preserve our oneness, we
fail. What would be left to us I do not know; but I am sure that an
England which had accepted conditions of peace at Germany's hands would
not be the England that any of us know. There might still be a few
Englishmen, but they would have to look about for somewhere to live.
Serbia would be a good place; it has made no peace-treaty with Germany.

We are profoundly at one; and are divided only by illusions, which the
press, in times past, has done much to keep alive. One of these
illusions is the illusion of party. I have never been behind the scenes,
among the creaking machinery, but my impression, as a spectator, is that
parties in England are made very much as you pick up sides for a game. I
have observed that they are all conservative. The affections are
conservative; every one has a liking for his old habits and his old
associates. There is something comic in a well-nourished rich man who
believes that he is a bold reformer and a destructive thinker. For real
clotted reactionary sentiment I know nothing to match the table-talk of
any aged parliamentary Radical. When we get a Labour Government, it will
be patriotic, prejudiced, opposed to all innovation, superstitiously
reverential of the past, sticky and, probably, tyrannical.

The party illusion has been much weakened by the War, and those who
still repeat the old catch-words are very near to lunacy. There is a
deeper and more dangerous illusion which has not been killed--the class
illusion. We are all very much alike; but we live in water-tight
compartments called classes, and the inhabitants of each compartment
tend to believe that they alone are patriotic. This illusion, to be
just, is not fostered chiefly by the press, which wants to sell its work
to all classes; but it has strong hold of the Government office. The
Government does not know the people, except as an actor knows the
audience; and therefore does not trust the people. It is pathetic to
hear officials talking timidly of the people--will they endure hardships
and sacrifices, will they carry through? Yet most of the successes we
have won in the War have to be credited not so much to the skill of the
management as to the amazing high courage of the ordinary soldier and
sailor. Even soldiers are often subject to class illusion. I remember
listening, in the first month of the War, to a retired colonel, who
explained, with some hea