But the idea of the nation carries us a long way further than I have yet shown.  It bids us all try at the peril of England’s fall to get the best Government we can to lead us.  We need a man to preside over the nation’s counsels, to settle the line of Britain’s duty in Europe and in her own Empire, and of her duty to her own people, to the millions who are growing up ill fed, ill housed and ill trained, and yet who are part of the sovereign people.  We need to give him as councillors men that are masters of the tasks in which for the nation to fail means its ruin, the tasks of which I have enumerated those that are vital.  Do we give him a master of the history of the other nations to guide the nation’s dealings with them?  Do we give him a master of war to educate admirals and generals?  Do we give him a master of the sciences to direct the pursuit of knowledge, and a master of character-building to supervise the bringing up of boys and girls to be types of a noble life?  It would serve the nation’s turn to have such men.  They are among us, and to find them we should only have to look for them.  It would be no harder than to pick apples off a tree.  But we never dream of looking for them.  We have a wonderful plan of choosing our leaders, the plan which we call an election.  Five hundred men assemble in a hall and listen to a speech from a partisan, while five hundred others in a hall in the next street are cheering a second partisan who declaims against the first.  There is no test of either speaker, except that he must be rich enough to pay the expenses of an “election.”  The voters do not even listen to both partisans in order to judge between them.  Thus we choose our members of Parliament.  Our Government is a committee of some twenty of them.  Its first business is to keep its authority against the other party, of which in turn the chief function is to make out that everything the Government does is wrong.  This is the only recognised plan for leading the nation.

You may be shocked as you read this by the plainness of my words, but you know them to be true, though you suppose that to insist on the facts is “impracticable” because you fancy that there is no way out of the marvellously absurd arrangements that exist.  But there is a way out, though it is no royal road.  It is this.  Get the meaning of the nation into your own head and then make a present to England of your party creed.  Ask yourself what is the one thing most needed now, and the one thing most needed for the future.  You will answer, because you know it to be true, that the one thing most needed now is to get the navy right.