Page:Tyranny of Shams (1916).djvu/9

 This is true of all nations,—it may be the turn of the United States, or Norway, or Argentina tomorrow,—but it is most seriously true of England. Do not let us fuddle our minds with the kind of rhetoric one addresses to schoolboys. We have, in the first year of the war, betrayed a sluggishness, a lack of foresight and initiative, a feebleness of organisation, which ought to sober any race, however wealthy. Our Government knew, or ought to have known, since the spring of 1912, that just this war was threatening us; and, when it occurred, they made a virtue of the fact that we were “the least prepared nation in Europe.” They took nine months to begin to organise our resources, or to perceive that it was necessary to do so. Plainly, there is something profoundly, comprehensively wrong with our public life. We shall “muddle through,” because we have the resources, and because the Allies outnumber their opponents by fifty per cent. But if in a future war we are compelled to face a numerically equal opponent, England will, if she retains these faults, see her royal standard in the dust. As it is, the cost of our ineptitude will be prodigious.

So I am confirmed in my design to declare what seems to me to be wrong with our life. I choose the form of a direct challenge of old traditions mainly because they so oppress and benumb the public mind that new ideals do not get a fair consideration. But it will be found that behind the series of challenges there is a series of affirmations,