That, however, is a question by the way.  It is not the main thing that I have to say here.  What I have to say here is that in Great Britain—­I will not discuss the affairs of any of our Allies—­there are groups and classes of people, not numerous, not representative, but placed in high and influential positions and capable of free and public utterance, who are secretly and bitterly hostile to this great War Aim, which inspires all the Allied peoples.  These people are permitted to deny—­our peculiar censorship does not hamper them—­loudly and publicly that we are fighting for democracy and world freedom; “Tosh,” they say to our dead in the trenches, “you died for a mistake”; they jeer at this idea of a League of Nations making an end to war, an idea that has inspired countless brave lads to face death and such pains and hardships as outdo even death itself; they perplex and irritate our Allies by propounding schemes for some precious economic league of the British Empire—­that is to treat all “foreigners” with a common base selfishness and stupid hatred—­and they intrigue with the most reactionary forces in Russia.

These British reactionaries openly, and with perfect impunity, represent our war as a thing as mean and shameful as Germany’s attack on Belgium, and they do it because generosity and justice in the world is as terrible to them as dawn is to the creatures of the night.  Our Tories blundered into this great war, not seeing whither it would take them.  In particular it is manifest now by a hundred signs that they dread the fall of monarchy in Germany and Austria.  Far rather would they make the most abject surrenders to the Kaiser than deal with a renascent Republican Germany.  The recent letter of Lord Lansdowne, urging a peace with German imperialism, was but a feeler from the pacifist side of this most un-English, and unhappily most influential, section of our public life.  Lord Lansdowne’s letter was the letter of a Peer who fears revolution more than national dishonour.

But it is the truculent wing of this same anti-democratic movement that is far more active.  While our sons suffer and die for their comforts and conceit, these people scheme to prevent any communication between the Republican and Socialist classes in Germany and the Allied population.  At any cost this class of pampered and privileged traitors intend to have peace while the Kaiser is still on his throne.  If not they face a new world—­in which their part will be small indeed.  And with the utmost ingenuity they maintain a dangerous vagueness about the Allied peace terms, with the sole object of preventing a revolutionary movement in Germany.