Now it can be Told

The nation, so far, has not found a remedy for the evil that has overtaken us. Rather in a kind of madness that is not without a strange splendor, like a ship that goes down with drums beating and banners flying, we are racing toward the rocks. At this time, when we are sorely stricken and in dire poverty and debt, we have extended the responsibilities of empire and of world-power as though we had illimitable wealth. Our sphere of influence includes Persia, Tibet, Arabia, Palestine, Egypt -- a vast part of the Mohammedan world. Yet if any part of our possessions were to break into revolt or raise a "holy war" against us, we should be hard pressed for men to uphold our power and prestige, and our treasury would be called upon in vain for gold. After the war which was to crush militarism the air force alone proposed an annual expenditure of more than twice as much money as the whole cost of the army before the war. While the armaments of the German people, whom we defeated in the war against militarism, are restricted to a few warships and a navy of 100,000 men at a cost reckoned as £10,000,000 a year, we are threatened with a naval and military program costing £300,000,000 a year. Was it for this our men fought? Was it to establish a new imperialism upheld by the power of guns that 900,000 boys of ours died in the war of liberation? I know it was otherwise. There are people at the street-corners who know; and in the tramcars and factories and little houses in mean streets where there are empty chairs and the portraits of dead boys.

It will go hard with the government of England if it plays a grandiose drama before hostile spectators who refuse to take part in it. It will go hard with the nation, for it will be engulfed in anarchy.