any other man who can push and inspire as well as he does.  It would be a mistake, therefore, to pay too much heed to any particular utterance of this electrical creature of moods, on any subject.

Nevertheless, he hasn’t thought out the project of a league to enforce peace further than to see the difficulties.  He sees that such a league might mean, in theory at least, the giving over in some possible crisis the command of the British Fleet to an officer of some other nationality.  That’s unthinkable to any red-blooded son of these islands.  Seeing a theoretical possibility even of raising such a question, the British mind stops and refuses to go further—­refuses in most cases even to inquire seriously whether any such contingency is ever likely to come.

The British Grand Fleet, in fact, is a subject that stands alone in power and value and in difficulties.  It classifies itself with nothing else.  Since over and over again it has saved these islands from invasion when nothing else could have saved them and since during this war in particular it has saved the world from German conquest—­as every Englishman believes—­it lies in their reverence and their gratitude and their abiding convictions as a necessary and perpetual shield so long as Great Britain shall endure.  If the Germans are thrashed to a frazzle (and we haven’t altogether done that yet) and we set about putting the world in order, when we come to discuss Disarmament, the British Fleet will be the most difficult item in the world to dispose of.  It is not only a Fact, with a great and saving history, it is also a sacred Tradition and an Article of Faith.

The first reason, therefore, why the British general mind has not firmly got hold on a league is the instinctive fear that the formation of any league may in some conceivable way affect the Grand Fleet.  Another reason is the general inability of a somewhat slow public opinion to take hold on more than one subject at a time or more than one urgent part of one subject.  The One Subject, of course, is winning the war.  Since everything else depends on that, everything else must wait on that.

The League, therefore, has not taken hold on the public imagination here as it has in the United States.  The large mass of the people have not thought seriously about it:  it has not been strongly and persistently presented to the mass of the people.  There is no popular or general organization to promote it.  There is even, here and there, condemnation of the idea.  The (London) Morning Post, for example, goes out of its way once in a while to show the wickedness of the idea because, so it argues, it will involve the sacrifice, more or less, of nationality.  But the Morning Post is impervious to new ideas and is above all things critical in its activities and very seldom constructive.  The typical Tory mind in general sees no good in the idea.  The typical Tory mind is the insular