The basis of peace negotiations must necessarily be settled in advance by representatives of all the allied Governments in conclave.  The mandate of each Government in regard to the conclave is the affair of that Government, and it is the affair of no other Government.  The mandate of our Government is, therefore, the affair of our Government, and the allied Governments are just as much entitled to criticise or object to it as we, for example, are entitled to suggest to the Czar how he ought to behave in Finland.  Our Government, being a democratic Government, has no right to go into conclave without a mandate from the people who elected it.  It possesses no mandate of the kind.  It has a mandate, and a mighty one, to prosecute the war, and it is prosecuting the war to the satisfaction of the majority of the electorate.  But a peace treaty is a different and an incomparably more important thing.  Up to the present the mind of the nation has found no expression, and it probably will not find any expression unless the Government recognizes fairly that it is a representative Government and behaves with the deference which is due from a representative Government.  As matters stand, the mandate of the British Government will come, not from Britain, but from Russia and France.

The great argument drawn from the Government’s alleged duty to the allied Governments is, no doubt, reinforced, in the minds of Ministers and at Cabinet meetings, by two subsidiary arguments.  The first of these rests in the traditional assumption that all international politics must be committed, perpetrated, and accomplished in secret.  This strange traditional notion will die hard, but some time it will have to die, and at the moment of its death excellent and sincere persons will be convinced that the knell of the British Empire has sounded.  The knell of the British Empire has frequently sounded.  It sounded when capital punishment was abolished for sheep-stealing, when the great reform bill was passed, when purchase was abolished in the army, when the deceased wife’s sister bill was passed, when the Parliament act became law; and it will positively sound again when the mediaeval Chinese traditions of the Diplomatic Service are cast aside.  There are many important people alive today who are so obsessed by those traditions as to believe religiously that if the British people, and by consequence the German Government, were made aware of the peace terms, the German Army would in some mysterious way be strengthened and encouraged, and our own ultimate success imperiled.  Such is the power of the dead hand, and against this power the new conviction that in a democratic and candid foreign policy lies the future safety of the world will have to fight hard.