The War did not dishearten him.  When he died, in August, 1917, he said, ’Here I lie on my death-bed, looking clear into the Promised Land.  I’m not allowed to enter it, but there it is before my eyes.  After the War the people of this country will enter it, and those who laughed at me for a dreamer will see that I wasn’t so wrong after all.  But there’s still work to do for those who didn’t laugh, hard work, and with much opposition in the way; all the same, it is work right up against the goal.  My dreams have come true.’

One of the clear gains of the War is to be found in the increased activity and alertness of our own people.  The motto of to-day is, ’Let those now work who never worked before, And those who always worked now work the more.’  Before the War we had a great national reputation for idleness—­in this island, at least.  I remember a friendly critic from Canada who, some five or six years ago, expressed to me, with much disquiet, his opinion that there was something very far wrong with the old country; that we had gone soft.  As for our German critics, they expressed the same view in gross and unmistakable fashion.  Wit is not a native product in Germany, it all has to be imported, so they could not satirize us; but their caricatures of the typical Englishman showed us what they thought.  He was a young weakling with a foolish face, and was dressed in cricketing flannels.  It would have been worth their while to notice what they did not notice, that his muscles and nerves are not soft.  They learned that later, when the bank-clerks of Manchester broke the Prussian Guard into fragments at Contalmaison.  This must have been a sad surprise, for the Germans had always taught, in their delightful authoritative fashion, that the chief industries of the young Englishman are lawn-tennis and afternoon tea.  They are a fussy people, and they find it difficult to understand the calm of the man who, having nothing to do, does it.  Perhaps they were right, and we were too idle.  The disease was never so serious as they thought it, and now, thanks to them, we are in a fair way to recovery.  The idle classes have turned their hand to the lathe and the plough.  Women are doing a hundred things that they never did before, and are doing them well.  The elasticity and resourcefulness that the War has developed will not be lost or destroyed by the coming of peace.  Least of all will those qualities be lost if we should prove unable, in this War, to impose our own terms on Germany.  Then the peace that follows will be a long struggle, and in that struggle we shall prevail.  In the last long peace we were not suspicious; we felt friendly enough to the Germans, and we gave them every advantage.  They despised us for our friendliness and used the peace to prepare our downfall.  That will never happen again.  If we cannot tame the cunning animal that has assaulted humanity, at least we can and will tether him.  Laws will not be necessary; there are millions of others besides the seamen of England who will have no dealings with an unsubdued and unrepentant Germany.  What the Germans are not taught by the War they will have to learn in the more tedious and no less costly school of peace.