to declare war on Germany just as if we had such an army,
and then trust to the appalling resultant peril and disaster to drive us
into wholesale enlistment, voluntary or (better still from the Junker
point of view) compulsory. It seems to me that a nation which tolerates
such insensate methods and outrageous risks must shortly perish from
sheer lunacy. And it is all pure superstition: the retaining of the
methods of Edward the First in the reign of George the Fifth. I
therefore suggest that the first lesson of the war is that the Secretary
of State for Foreign Affairs be reduced to the level of a simple Prime
Minister, or even of a constitutional monarch, powerless to fire a
single shot or sign a treaty without the authority of the House of
Commons, all diplomatic business being conducted in a blaze of
publicity, and the present regulation which exacts the qualification of
a private income of at least L400 a year for a position in the
Diplomatic Service replaced by a new regulation that at least half the
staff shall consist of persons who have never dined out at the houses of
hosts of higher rank than unfashionable solicitors or doctors.

In these recommendations I am not forgetting that an effective check on
diplomacy is not easy to devise, and that high personal character and
class disinterestedness (the latter at present unattainable) on the part
of our diplomatists will be as vital as ever. I well know that diplomacy
is carried on at present not only by official correspondence meant for
possible publication and subject to an inspection which is in some
degree a responsible inspection, but by private letters which the King
himself has no right to read. I know that even in the United States,
where treaties and declarations of war must be made by Parliament, it is
nevertheless possible for the President to bring about a situation in
which Congress, like our House of Commons in the present instance, has
no alternative but to declare war. But though complete security is
impracticable, it does not follow that no precautions should be taken,
or that a democratic tradition is no safer than a feudal tradition. A
far graver doubt is raised by the susceptibility of the masses to war
fever, and the appalling danger of a daily deluge of cheap newspapers
written by nameless men and women whose scandalously low payment is a
guarantee of their ignorance and their servility to the financial
department, controlled by a moneyed class