The Government of England had taken swift and skilful steps to reassure those who, like Mabel, recoiled from the inevitable logic of the new policy.  An army of speakers traversed the country, defending and explaining; the press was engineered with extraordinary adroitness, and it was possible to say that there was not a person among the millions of England who had not easy access to the Government’s defence.

Briefly, shorn of rhetoric, their arguments were as follows, and there was no doubt that, on the whole, they had the effect of quieting the amazed revolt of the more sentimental minds.

Peace, it was pointed out, had for the first time in the world’s history become an universal fact.  There was no longer one State, however small, whose interests were not identical with those of one of the three divisions of the world of which it was a dependency, and that first stage had been accomplished nearly half-a-century ago.  But the second stage—­the reunion of these three divisions under a common head—­an infinitely greater achievement than the former, since the conflicting interests were incalculably more vast—­this had been consummated by a single Person, Who, it appeared, had emerged from humanity at the very instant when such a Character was demanded.  It was surely not much to ask that those on whom these benefits had come should assent to the will and judgment of Him through whom they had come.  This, then, was an appeal to faith.

The second main argument was addressed to reason.  Persecution, as all enlightened persons confessed, was the method of a majority of savages who desired to force a set of opinions upon a minority who did not spontaneously share them.  Now the peculiar malevolence of persecution in the past lay, not in the employment of force, but in the abuse of it.  That any one kingdom should dictate religious opinions to a minority of its members was an intolerable tyranny, for no one State possessed the right to lay down universal laws, the contrary to which might be held by its neighbour.  This, however, disguised, was nothing else than the Individualism of Nations, a heresy even more disastrous to the commonwealth of the world than the Individualism of the Individual.  But with the arrival of the universal community of interests the whole situation was changed.  The single personality of the human race had succeeded to the incoherence of divided units, and with that consummation—­which might be compared to a coming of age, an entirely new set of rights had come into being.  The human race was now a single entity with a supreme responsibility towards itself; there were no longer any private rights at all, such as had certainly existed, in the period previous to this.  Man now possessed dominion over every cell which composed His Mystical Body, and where any such cell asserted itself to the detriment of the Body, the rights of the whole were unqualified.