st or Pro-German at their opponent.
Party leaders seek such followers, who can always be depended on to walk
tamely into the lobby at the party whip's orders, provided the leader
will make their seats safe for them by the process which was called,
in derisive reference to the war rationing system, "giving them the
coupon." Other incidents were so grotesque that I cannot mention them
without enabling the reader to identify the parties, which would not be
fair, as they were no more to blame than thousands of others who must
necessarily be nameless. The general result was patently absurd; and
the electorate, disgusted at its own work, instantly recoiled to the
opposite extreme, and cast out all the coupon candidates at the earliest
bye-elections by equally silly majorities. But the mischief of the
general election could not be undone; and the Government had not only to
pretend to abuse its European victory as it had promised, but actually
to do it by starving the enemies who had thrown down their arms. It had,
in short, won the election by pledging itself to be thriftlessly wicked,
cruel, and vindictive; and it did not find it as easy to escape from
this pledge as it had from nobler ones. The end, as I write, is not yet;
but it is clear that this thoughtless savagery will recoil on the
heads of the Allies so severely that we shall be forced by the sternest
necessity to take up our share of healing the Europe we have wounded
almost to death instead of attempting to complete her destruction.

The Yahoo and the Angry Ape

Contemplating this picture of a state of mankind so recent that no
denial of its truth is possible, one understands Shakespeare comparing
Man to an angry ape, Swift describing him as a Yahoo rebuked by the
superior virtue of the horse, and Wellington declaring that the British
can behave themselves neither in victory nor defeat. Yet none of the
three had seen war as we have seen it. Shakespeare blamed great men,
saying that "Could great men thunder as Jove himself does, Jove would
ne'er be quiet; for every pelting petty officer would use his heaven for
thunder: nothing but thunder." What would Shakespeare have said if he
had seen something far more destructive than thunder in the hand of
every village laborer, and found on the Messines Ridge the craters
of the nineteen volcanoes that were let loose there at the touch of a
finger that might have been a child's finger without the result being a
whit less