The game is in our hands if we will only play it.  The talk about our resources and staying power is not all “hot air,” as the Americans say.  The resources were there, and it was always known that in the later stages of the war, when Germany and our Allies who entered the war at final strength, had used most of their resources, then those of Britain would become decisive because she had not yet used them.  That stage we are reaching now—­Britain’s resources measured against those of Germany.  We have the advantage in entering it.  The danger is that while we squander our wealth without organisation, the German, by bringing all his brains and resolution to bear on the problem, may so eke out his strained resources as to outstay our rich ones.

One sees not the least sign that the British people understand this.  I do not know how it is in Australia, but in Britain life runs its normal course.  Gigantic sums flow away daily, and the only efforts at economy one hears of are a Daylight Saving Act adopted only because Germany adopted it first; a list of prohibited imports and petty economies, which we mistook when first we read it for an elaborate satire; and a pious hope, in the true voluntary and official British style, that meat would be shunned on two days in the week.

By way of contrast there are dished out for our encouragement reports of all the pains which the Germans are put to to economise food in their country.  Potatoes instead of flour, meat twice a week, food strictly regulated by ticket, children taught to count between each mouthful in order to avoid over-eating.  We are supposed to draw comfort from this contrast.

It is the most depressing literature we have.  The obvious comment is, “Well, there is a nation organised to win a war—­that is the sort of nation which the men in the opposite trenches have behind them.  A nation which has organised itself for war, and is already organising itself for peace after the war”; and all that we, who are organised neither for war nor peace, have, in answer to a national effort like that, is an ignorant jeer at what is really the most formidable of the dangers threatening us.

If the British Empire took the war as business, were ready to disturb its daily life, alter its daily habits, to throw on the scrap-heap its sacred individualism, and do and live for the national cause, no one doubts but we could win this war so as to avoid an inconclusive peace.  Some of us were talking to a middle-aged British merchant.  We had left our fellows in France cheerfully facing unaccustomed mud and frosts, cheerfully accepting the chance of being blown into undiscoverable atoms or living horribly maimed in mind or body, cheerfully accepting all this with the set, deliberate purpose of fighting on for a conclusive settlement—­one which put out of question for the future the rule of brute force, or tearing up of treaties, or renewal of the present war.  We had left those fellows fighting for an ideal they perfectly well realised, and cheerful in the belief that they would attain it.