this welcome
settlement was a triumph, not of statesmanship, but of murderous
brutality. There would have been no paens if there had been no volleys,
no triumph if there had been no violence.

Statesmanship was defeated in the eighties, and those who defeated it,
those who exalted prejudice and racialism and intolerance above
rationality and foresight, are now among those whom the world salutes as
immortal statesmen. In truth, they have bowed the knee to violence.

By the same power, and not by reason, the Government extended the
franchise to women. Statesmanship held firmly on the contrary course
till the winds of violence rose and the rain of anarchy threatened to
descend in a flood of moral devastation.

Look closely into the great achievements of the Washington Conference
and you will find that the nations are not voluntarily seeking the
rational ideal of peace, but are being driven by urgent necessity into
the course of reason. Statesmanship would have disarmed the world before
1914. It was only after 1918 that the spectre of Universal Bankruptcy
drove the poor trembling immortals who pass for statesmen to embrace
each other as heroes in search of an ideal. Humanity has achieved
nothing noble or glorious in the last thirty years; it has been driven
by the winds of God into every haven which has saved it from shipwreck.

With a clear understanding of the meaning of the word statesmanship, one
may ask with some hope of arriving at an intelligent answer whether
Randall Davidson is a great statesman.

Under his rule a divided and distracted Church has held together; but
religion has gone out of favour. During his reign at Lambeth there has
been a sensible movement towards reunion; but the nation is
uninterested. If the Romanists have been less rebellious, the
Evangelicals have lost almost all their zeal. If the Church still
witnesses to the truth of Christianity, it is with all her ancient
inequalities thick upon her, turning her idealism to ridicule, and in
the midst of a nation which has become steadily more and more
indifferent to the Church, more and more cynical towards religion.

If there is peace in the Church, there is little of that moral
earnestness in the life of the nation which in past times laid the
foundations both of English character and of English greatness. We are
becoming swiftly, I think, a light and flippant people, the only
seriousness in our midst the economic seriousness of our depressed