If in the midst of these misfortunes, caused by the mere fact of war, should come the news of defeat at sea, still more serious consequences must follow.  After defeat at sea all regular and secure communication between Great Britain, her Colonies, and India comes to an end.  With the terrible blow to Britain’s reputation which defeat at sea must bring, what will be the position of the 100,000 British in India who for a century have governed a population of nearly 300,000,000?  What can the Colonies do to help Great Britain under such conditions?  For the command of the sea nothing, and even if each of them had a first-rate army, what would be the use of those armies to this country in her hour of need?  They cannot be brought to Europe unless the British navy commands the sea.

These are some of the material consequences of defeat.  But what of its spiritual consequences?  We have brought up our children in the pride of a great nation, and taught them of an Empire on which the sun never sets.  What shall we say to them in the hour of defeat and after the treaty of peace imposed by the victor?  They will say:  “Find us work and we will earn our bread and in due time win back the greatness that has been lost.”  But how are they to earn their bread?  In this country half the employers will have been ruined by the war.  The other half will have lost heavily, and much of the wealth even of the very rich will have gone to keep alive the innumerable multitude of starving unemployed.  These will be advised after the war to emigrate.  To what country?  Englishmen, after defeat, will everywhere be at a discount.  Words will not describe, and the imagination cannot realise, the suffering of a defeated nation living on an island which for fifty years has not produced food enough for its population.

The material and spiritual results of defeat can easily be recognised by any one who takes the trouble to think about the question, though only experience either at first hand or supplied by history can enable a man fully to grasp its terrible nature.  But a word must be said on the social and political consequences inseparable from the wreck of a State whose Government has been unable to fulfil its prime function, that of providing security for the national life.  All experience shows that in such cases men do not take their troubles calmly.  They are filled with passion.  Their feelings find vent in the actions to which their previous currents of thought tended.  The working class, long accustomed by its leaders to regard the capitalists as a class with interests and aims opposed to its own, will hardly be able in the stress of unemployment and of famine to change its way of thinking.  The mass of the workmen, following leaders whose judgment may not perhaps be of the soundest but who will undoubtedly sincerely believe that the doctrines with which they have grown up are true, may assail the existing social order and lay the blame of their misfortunes upon the class which