of 1909, when he spoke of our modern civilisation “rattling into barbarism,” he gave a hint of the movement to which alone I am inclined to trust.  “I can only foresee,” he exclaimed, “the working-classes of Europe uniting in a great federation to cry:  ’We will have no more of this madness and foolery, which is grinding us to powder!’” The words may not have been entirely sincere—­something had to be said for the Liberal Press tables, which cheered while the Imperialists sat glum; but there, I believe, lies the ultimate and only possible chance of hope.  We must revolutionise our Governments; we must recognise the abject folly of allowing these vital questions of peace, war, and armaments to be decided according to the caprice or advantage of a single man, a clique of courtiers, a gang of adventurers, or the Cabal of a Cabinet formed from the very classes which have most to gain and least to lose, whether from actual war or the competition in armaments.  Over this Executive, whether it is called Emperor, King, Court, or Cabinet, the people of the nation has no control—­or nothing like adequate control—­in foreign affairs and questions of war.  In England in the year 1910 not a single hour was allowed for Foreign Office debate in the Commons.  In no country of Europe have the men and women of the State a real voice in a matter which touches every man and every woman so closely as war touches them—­even distant war, but far more the kind of war that devastates the larder, sweeps out the drawing-room, encamps in the back garden, and at any moment may reduce the family by half.[17] One remembers that picture in Carlyle, how thirty souls from the British village of Dumdrudge are brought face to face with thirty souls from a French Dumdrudge, after infinite effort.  The word “Fire!” is given, and they blow the souls out of one another: 

“Had these men any quarrel?” asks the Sartor.  “Busy as the Devil is, not the smallest!  They lived far enough apart—­were the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a Universe there was even, unconsciously, by Commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them.  How then?  Simpleton! their Governors had fallen out; and, instead of shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot.”

Slowly and dimly the Dumdrudges of the world—­the peasants and artisans, the working people, the people who have most right to count—­are beginning to recognise the absurdity of paying and dying for wars of which they know nothing, and in the quarrels of kings and ministers for whom they have neither reverence nor love.  “What is the British Empire to me,” I heard a Whitechapel man say, “when I have to open the window before I get room to put on my trousers?” A section of the country was opposed to the Crimean War; a far larger section was opposed to the Boer War.  Both were ridiculed, persecuted, and maltreated; but nearly everyone now admits that both were right.  In the next unjust or unreasonable war the peace party will