The party illusion has been much weakened by the War, and those who still repeat the old catch-words are very near to lunacy.  There is a deeper and more dangerous illusion which has not been killed—­the class illusion.  We are all very much alike; but we live in water-tight compartments called classes, and the inhabitants of each compartment tend to believe that they alone are patriotic.  This illusion, to be just, is not fostered chiefly by the press, which wants to sell its work to all classes; but it has strong hold of the Government office.  The Government does not know the people, except as an actor knows the audience; and therefore does not trust the people.  It is pathetic to hear officials talking timidly of the people—­will they endure hardships and sacrifices, will they carry through?  Yet most of the successes we have won in the War have to be credited not so much to the skill of the management as to the amazing high courage of the ordinary soldier and sailor.  Even soldiers are often subject to class illusion.  I remember listening, in the first month of the War, to a retired colonel, who explained, with some heat, that the territorials could never be of any use.  That illusion has gone.  Then it was Kitchener’s army—­well-meaning people, no doubt, but impossible for a European war.  Kitchener’s army made good.  Now it is the civil population, who, though they are the blood relatives of the soldiers, are distrusted, and believed to be likely to fail under a strain.  Yet all the time, if you want to hear half-hearted, timid, pusillanimous talk, the place where you are most likely to hear it is in the public offices.  Most of those who talk in this way would be brave enough in fight, but they are kept at desks, and worried with detailed business, and harassed by speculative dangers, and they lose perspective.  Soon or late, we are going to win this War; and it is the people who are going to win it.

If the press (or perhaps the Government, which controls the press) is not afraid of the people, why does it tell them so little about our reverses, and the merits of our enemies?  For information concerning these things we have to depend wholly on conversation with returned soldiers.  For instance, the horrible stories that we hear of the brutal treatment of our prisoners are numerous, and are true, and make a heavy bill against Germany, which bill we mean to present.  But are they fair examples of the average treatment?  We cannot tell; the accounts published are almost exclusively confined to the worst happenings.  Most of the officers with whom I have talked who had been in several German military prisons said that they had nothing serious to complain of.  Prison is not a good place, and it is not pleasant to have your pea-soup and your coffee, one after the other, in the same tin dipper; but they were soldiers, and they agreed that it would be absurd to make a grievance of things like that.  One private soldier was an even greater philosopher.  ‘No’, he said, ’I have nothing to complain of.  Of course, they do spit at you a good deal.’  That man was unconquerable.