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armour, long invited attack. Long did her enemy spy for a joint in the armour, and presently he saw it. weapon which would serve to pierce the joint. the submarine.

There was one That weapon is

If England could feed herself, if England, instead of thinking of money and exchange values, had thought of producing real things, the submarine would be as impotent to decide a war as were the French cruisers pursuing the guerre de course, the war on commerce, in the old wars, when England was self-sufficing. At first, the Admiralty appear to have regarded the submarine warfare as strictly analogous to the old cruiser depredations, which took about 2 per cent. of the number of English ships annually, and which did not affect the main course of the war. The fact is, there is no such analogy.

Again, the old weapon of blockade, used with so paralysing an effect upon France in the time of Napoleon, was regarded by the Admiralty (apart from diplomatic restrictions imposed upon its use by the Government) as equally effective to-day. Here again the analogy was defective, for in the days of Bonaparte there were no railways giving swift access to neutral frontiers and easy intercommunication. Moreover, Germany, having taken the trouble to analyse the situation during some forty years of trained study, understood that in peace as in war self-sufficiency is the first essential condition of success. A partial blockade might put her to straits. It would not starve her. Nor has it starved her. Now she has pushed Eastwards, and can ransack the vast granaries of Russia.

In the meantime the submarine is at work, blockading England, the dependent nation. The Navy is giving a good account of the submarine, and it is no fault of the Navy that the country behind it went out of cultivation and had to go to market across the seas, and chose to live on the production of other countries. It is no fault of the Navy that shipbuilding is deficient. It is the fault of the people who began by persuading themselves that there would be no more war, and ended by persuading themselves that war would serve to replace the lost powers of production.

It is easy enough to blame the Government, to perceive defects in the Food Control, to deplore the extraordinary fatuity which separated Food Control from Food Production and set the two Departments quarrelling with each other, to criticize the shipbuilding control, to condemn the workmen, and to despair of the Ministry of Munitions. But all these things are but the inevitable results of an evil national principle. It is tried and found wanting. And those whose business it is to repent and to start anew are the very men whose whole lives have been spent in the thraldom of the wrong idea. They continue to cling to

the idea while feverishly trying to patch up its disastrous consequences. Their only hope of saving the situation at the beginning was to put the sea first, and they put it last. Had they kept the sea, they could have increased production behind the steel bulwarks of the Navy. They did neither, because they did not understand.

It is probable that the command of the sea can never again be exercised in the old complete fashion. It is certain that these islands are from henceforth open to invasion by way of the air. If in these circumstances England does not bend its whole will to becoming self-sufficient and independent, whether she lose the war or win it her future economic subservience will be assured.

As matters stand, it may be that the Navy will defeat the submarine in time. But the submarine will remain so formidable a menace for the future to a dependent nation, that such a nation can never hold its own nor enjoy liberty of action.

It is not the Navy that has failed the country, but the country that has failed the Navy. For years before the war the constant preoccupation of studious naval officers was the haunting thought of the utter and helpless dependence of England. They knew that a task was being laid upon the Navy greater than any Navy could fulfil. Never before in English history had the Navy been charged with whole duty of defending and supplying an unproductive country. As a matter of fact, the thing was and will remain impossible. The conditions could only last until they were seriously challenged.

For long the true spirit of England has been like Penelope left in the house of Ulysses, besieged with alien suitors and sorners, spinning her web and unravelling it again. Now Penelope is coming to the end of her thread; and still the bow of Ulysses waits unstrung, and none steps across the threshold who can bend it.

L. COPE CORNFORD

THE

NATIONAL REVIEW

No. 423. MAY 1918

Early
Innocence

EPISODES OF THE MONTH

RECENT events must have taught every Briton capable of learning anything that we impose an intolerable burden on our cause and on our country by entrusting the control and management of the war to civilians, whose not inconsiderable gifts lie exclusively in other directions. This handicap was inevitable in 1914, when the long-gathering storm burst, taking the British Government completely by surprise, as Mr. Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, confessed in a burst of confidence which was infinitely creditable to his heart:

There was not a man in the Cabinet who thought that war with Germany was a possibility under the present conditions. (The City Temple, November 10, 1914.) It could hardly have been otherwise with Ministers so obstinately blind to every sign of the times that earlier that same year the Chancellor of the Exchequer, doubtless under the inspiration of Lord Haldane, informed an astonished Europe:

This is the most favourable moment for twenty years to overhaul our expenditure on armaments. (Mr. Lloyd George, Daily Chronicle, January 1, 1914.)

While the Lord Chancellor himself, who was the pre-eminent expert on Germany of the Government and acting Foreign Minister whenever Sir Edward Grey was dry-fly fishing, simultaneously declared:

Europe was an armed camp, but an armed camp in which peace not only prevailed but in which the indications were that there was a far greater prospect of peace than ever there was before. No one wanted war. (Lord Haldane, Holborn, January 15, 1914.) That was regarded at the time as the last word in human wisdom, which any man was excommunicated as "a crank" for chal

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lenging. It expressed the policy of our Government practically until Germany mobilized. The same unsuspecting statesmen spoke with the same innocence to the last practicable moment, if not beyond it, although they had the advantage denied to their less fortunate countrymen of inside information which could only mean one thing, namely, that Germany was bent on war. Indeed we have since had the statement of their Chief, Mr. Asquith, that his Government had received the plainest possible intimation from Berlin in 1912 that aggression was Germany's policy:

They [the German Government] asked us-to put it quite plainly-they asked us for a free hand so far as we were concerned if, and when, they selected the opportunity, to overbear, to dominate the European world. (Mr. Asquith, at Cardiff, October 2, 1914.) Nevertheless our Chancellor of the Exchequer informed the Bankers of London so late as July 17, 1914:

I think now that we are entering into a quieter period it is well for us to dwell upon the enormous industrial expansion which we have witnessed during the last few years, whilst we are taking a period of rest, before we reach even higher things. The Lord Chancellor told the educational world:

I am not in the least afraid of the invasion of German armies, but I am very much afraid of the invasion of people who have been trained in German Universities and schools, and whose science has enabled them to compete with us, who are at a disadvantage because of their superior knowledge in science. (Lord Haldane, at the Hartley University College, Highfield, June 20, 1914.)

Continuing
Ignorance

WE quote none of these historic utterances for the pleasure of demonstrating the fatuity of their authors, nor in order to rake up a sterile past, but merely as a reminder of the auspices under which we prepared for war four years ago. It was, perhaps, almost inevitable that under the Parliamentary system professional Pacifists, who regarded war as too obsolete to merit the attention of responsible statesmen, should direct our affairs in peace-time and should even be found at the helm when they drifted into war, which the vainer ones now insist they always foresaw-thereby writing themselves down as traitors. Nor was it to be wondered at that they succeeded in hanging on during the first few months when as the "Government of the day" they claimed the support of a people equally taken unawares and not knowing where to turn for national leadership or war statesmanship, while the prestige of Lord Kitchener, who had been forced upon the Cabinet by the Man in the Street, helped to conceal the glaring deficiencies of the

Asquith Administration. But as the incompetence of purely party politicians became established under the sternest of all tests--and in this respect there was no difference between "Liberals" and "Unionists"-surely as patriots they should have dropped out, making way for those who presumably knew something of war. It is really stupefying that, despite a longcontinued demonstration of political ineptitude such as has surprised even their severest critics, because our Ministries comprised clever men, the Front Benches should still remain in unfettered control of the war in its fourth year, although we are supposed to be a Democracy, and the present Cabinet can hardly claim any degree of popularity outside immediately interested circles, although these include certain newspaper magnates who are able to some extent to falsify as well as to mislead public opinion. It is bewildering in the face of the events of the past year, and particularly the last month, to be told that there is no conceivable alternative to Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Bonar Law, and whatever colleagues they may choose to collect around them. While proclaiming our objective as making the world "safe for Democracy," we thereby so penalize Democracy that the future historian would be compelled to deduce that our War Aims must have included a possibly unconscious preference for Autocracy.

WAR is the hardest of all taskmasters, while party politics is perhaps the easiest. Every great and solid quality is demanded

Hard
Taskmaster

by the one, while the other only requires aptness of expression or skill in intrigue of its votaries. Therefore when we say that Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Bonar Law are ignorant and innocent of war-we lump them together because they belong to different parties--we cast no aspersion on their moral character. Their journalistic jackals become rabid when this delicate topic is alluded to, but it is the essence of the whole matter, the source of danger, the threat of catastrophe. How could they be expected to know anything of something of which they had had no experience whatsoever? It would be miraculous were it otherwise. A similar observation applies to their colleagues, more than one of whom has excellent brains, untiring industry, impressive eloquence. We are cheerfully prepared to credit any and every Minister with unimpeachable

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