Page:The Invasion of 1910.djvu/566

 action, and preyed upon the mind of the British Government.

The whole character of the nation and the Government had changed since the great days when, in the face of famine and immense peril, the country had fought Napoleon to the last and overthrown him. The strong aristocratic Government had been replaced by a weak Administration, swayed by every breath of popular impulse. The peasantry who were the backbone of the nation had vanished, and been replaced by the weak, excitable population of the towns.

Socialism, with its creed of "Thou shalt have no other god but Thyself," and its doctrine, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," had replaced the religious beliefs of a generation of Englishmen taught to suffer and to die sooner than surrender to wrong. In the hour of trial, amidst smoking ruins, among the holocausts of dead which marked the prolonged, bloody, and terrible battles on land and at sea, the spirit of the nation quailed, and there was really no great leader to recall it to ways of honour and duty.

Seven large German commerce-destroyers were still at sea in the Northern Atlantic. One of them was the splendid ex-Cunarder Lusitania, of 25 knots, which had been sold to a German firm a year before the war, when the British Government declined to continue its subsidy of £150,000 per annum to the Cunard Company under the agreement of 1902. The reason for withdrawing this subsidy was the need for economy, as money had to be obtained to pay members of Parliament. The Cunard Company, unable to bear the enormous cost of running both its huge 25-knot steamers, was compelled to sell the Lusitania, but with patriotic enterprise it retained the Mauretania, even though she was only worked at a dead loss.

The Mauretania, almost immediately after the outbreak of war, had been commissioned as a British cruiser, with orders specially to hunt for the Lusitania, which had now been renamed the Preussen. But it was easier