the Prussian Monarchy.  Most of them are not naturally warlike peoples.  They have been lured, and frightened, and drilled, and bribed into war, but it is true to say that, on the whole, they enjoy fighting less than we do.  One of the truest remarks ever made on the war was that famous remark of a British private soldier, who was telling how his company took a trench from the enemy.  Fearing that his account of the affair might sound boastful, he added, ’You see, Sir, they’re not a military people, like we are.’  Only the word was wrong, the meaning was right.  They are, as every one knows, an enormously military people, and, if they want to fight at all, they have to be a military people, for the vast majority of them are not a warlike people.  A first-class army could never have been fashioned in Germany out of volunteer civilians, like our army on the Somme.  That army has a little shaken the faith of the Germans in their creed.  Again I must quote one of our soldiers:  ‘I don’t say’, he remarked, ’that our average can run rings round their best; what I say is that our average is better than their average, and our best is better than their best.’  The Germans already are uneasy about their creed and their system, but there is no escape for them; they have sacrificed everything to it; they have impoverished the mind and drilled the imagination of every German citizen, so that Germany appears before the world with the body of a giant and the mind of a dwarf; they have sacrificed themselves in millions that their creed may prevail, and with their creed they must stand or fall.  The State, organized as absolute power, responsible to no one, with no duties to its neighbour, and with only nominal duties to a strictly subordinate God, has challenged the soul of man in its dearest possessions.  We cannot predict the course of military operations; but if we were not sure of the ultimate issue of this great struggle, we should have no sufficient motive for continuing to breathe.  The State has challenged the soul of man before now, and has always been defeated.  A miserable remnant of men and women, tied to stakes or starved in dungeons, have before now shattered what seemed an omnipotent tyranny, because they stood for the soul and were not prompted by vanity or self-regard.  They had great allies—­

     ’Their friends were exultations, agonies,
     And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.’

If we are defeated we shall be defeated not by German strength but by our own weakness.  The worst enemy of the martyr is doubt and the divided mind, which suggests the question, ‘Is it, after all, worth while?’ We must know what we have believed.  What do we stand for in this war?  It is only the immovable conviction that we stand for something ultimate and essential that can help us and carry us through.  No war of this kind and on this scale is good enough to fight unless it is good enough to fail in.  ‘The calculation of profit’, said Burke,’in all such wars is false.  On balancing the account of such wars, ten thousand hogs-heads of sugar are purchased at ten thousand times their price.  The blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man.  It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind.  The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.’