extend the scope of the Hague Tribunal. In vain. Germany would have none of them. Year by year, in a world of peace her battle-navy grew. "For what can it be intended but to attack England?" said the alarmist. But how few of us believed them! Our Tariff Reformers protested against the encroachments of German trade; but, outside a handful of persons who seemed to most of us fanatics, the emphasis lay always on care for our own people, and not on hostility to Germany. Those who warned us passionately that Germany meant to provoke a struggle, that the struggle must come, were very little heeded. Nobody slept the worse at night for their harangues. Lord Roberts's agitation for National Service, based on the portentous growth of the German Army and Navy, made comparatively little way. I speak from personal experience of a large Parliamentary division. "Did you foresee it?" I said to one of the ablest and most rising men in the Navy a fortnight ago. He thought a little. "I always felt there might be a clash over some colonial question—a quarrel about black men. But a war between the white nations over a European question—that Germany would force such a war—no, that I never believed!" Nor did any of us—except those few—those very few persons, who Cassandra-like, saw the coming horror plainly, and spoke to a deaf country.

"There was no hatred of Germany in this country"—I quote a Cabinet Minister. "Even in those parts of the country which had most reason to feel the trade rivalry of Germany, there was no thought of war, no wish for war!" It came upon England like one of those sudden spates through mountain clefts in spring, that fall with havoc on the plains beneath. After such days of wrestling for European peace as have left their indelible mark upon every member of the English Cabinet which declared war on August 4th, 1914, we fought because we must, because, in Luther's words, we "could no other."

What is the proof of this—the proof which history will accept as final—against the vain and lying pleas of Germany?

Nothing less than the whole history of the past eighteen months!—beginning with that initial lack of realisation, and those harassing difficulties of organisation with which we are now so often and so ignorantly reproached. At the word "Belgium" on August 4th, practically the whole English nation fell into line. We felt no doubts—we knew what we had to do. But the problem was how to do it. Outside the Navy and the Expeditionary Force, both of them ready to the last gun and button, we had neither men nor equipment equal to the fighting of a Continental war, and we knew it. The fact is more than our justification—it is our glory. If we had meant war, as Germany still hoarsely but more faintly says, week after week, to a world that listens no longer, could any nation of sane men have behaved as we did in the years before the war?—233,000 men on active service—and 263,000 Territorials, against Germany's millions!—with arsenals and equipment to match. Is it any wonder that the country—our untouched, uninvaded country—safe as it believed itself to be under the protection of its invincible Navy, was, in some sections of our population at any rate, slow to realise the enormous task to which—for the faith of treaties' sake, for self-defence's sake—it was committed?

And yet—was it after all so slow? The day after war was declared the Prime Minister asked Parliament to authorise the addition of half a million of men to the Army, and a first war credit of a hundred millions of money (five hundred million dollars). The first hundred thousand men came rolling up into the great military centres within a few days. By September 4th nearly three hundred thousand fresh men had enlisted—by Christmas half a million. By May, a million men had been added to the new Armies; by September, 1915, Sir John French alone had under his command close on a million men on the lines in France and Flanders, and in December, 1915, the addition of another million men to the Army was voted by Parliament, bringing up the British military strength to approximately four millions, excluding Colonials. And what of the Dominions? By November, 1915, Canada and Australia alone had sent us forces more than equal to the whole of that original Expeditionary Force, that "contemptible little army" which, broken and strained as it was by the sheer weight and fierceness of the German advance, yet held the gates of the Channel till England could fling her fresh troops into the field, and France—admirable France!—had recovered from the first onslaught of her terrible and ruthless enemy.

In one of my later letters I hope to give some particulars of this first rush of men, gathered from those who witnessed it and took part in it. One remarkable point in connection with it is that those districts most heavily employed in munition-making and coal-mining, the two industries absolutely indispensable to our Army and Navy, have also sent the largest supply of men to the fighting line—take, for instance, Newcastle and the Clyde. There have been anxious episodes, of course, in the great development. Was your own vast levy in the Civil War without them? And for the last half million men, we have had to resort, as Lincoln resorted, to a modified form of compulsion. There was, no doubt, a good deal of unnecessary waste and overlapping in the first camp and billeting organization of the enormous forces raised. But when all is said, did we not, in the language of a French observer "improvise the impossible"?—and have we not good reason to be proud?—not with any foolish vainglory, but with the sober and resolute pride of a great nation, conscious of its past, determined to correct its mistakes, and looking open-eyed and fearless towards the future?

Then as to munitions: in many ways, as you will perhaps say, and as I agree, a tragic story. If we had possessed last spring the ammunition—both for ourselves and our allies we now possess, the war would have gone differently. Drunkenness, trade-union difficulties, a small—very small—revolutionary element among our work people—all these have made trouble. But the real cause of our shortage lay in the fact that no one, outside Germany, realised till far into the war, what the ammunition needs—the absolutely unprecedented needs—of this struggle were going to be. It was the second Battle of Ypres at the end of April last year which burnt them into the English mind. We paid for the grim knowledge in thousands of our noblest lives. But since then?

In a later letter I propose to draw some picture in detail of the really marvellous movement which since last July, under the impulse given by Mr. Lloyd George, has covered England with new munition factories and added enormously to the producing power of the old and famous firms, has drawn in an army of women—now reckoned at something over a quarter of a million—and is at this moment not only providing amply for our own armies, but is helping those of the Allies against those final days of settlement with Germany which we believe to be now steadily approaching. American industry and enterprise have helped us substantially in this field of munitions. We are gratefully conscious of it. But England is now fast overtaking her own needs.

More of this presently. Meanwhile to the military and equipment effort of the country, you have to add the financial effort—something like $7,500,000,000, already expended on the war; the organising effort, exemplified in the wonderful "back of the army" in France, which I hope to describe to you; and the vast hospital system, with all its scientific adjuncts, and its constantly advancing efficiency.

And at the foundation of it all—the human and personal effort!—the lives given for England, the blood so generously shed for her, the homes that have sacrificed their all, our "golden lads" from all quarters and classes, whose young bodies lie mingled with an alien dust that "is for ever England," since they sleep there and hallow it; our mothers who mourn