cost less to run than one in town, and in many cases the patients will recover in half the time.  Our hospitals in London are always crowded, the waiting-lists mount up till it seems hopeless to attack them, and all the time it is because we have no base hospital down in the country to which our patients might be sent to recover.  I wonder how long it will be before each of the great London hospitals has its own base down in the country, with its own motor ambulances and its own ambulance coaches to carry its patients in comfort by rail to surroundings where they could recover as can never be possible in the middle of the London slums?  And as to getting the staff to look after it, there would probably be a waiting-list for week-ends.

But there are more important considerations in this war than surgery, and one would have to be very blind not to perceive that this is a life-and-death struggle between Britain and Germany.  The involvement of other nations is merely accidental.  It is ourselves whom Germany is making this huge effort to crush, and but for one small circumstance she would have come within a measurable prospect of success.  To swoop down on France through Belgium, to crush her in three weeks, to seize her fleet, and with the combined fleets of France and Germany to attack ours—­that was the proposition, and who can say that it might not have succeeded?  The small circumstance which Germany overlooked was Belgium, and it is to the heroic resistance of Belgium that we owe the fact that the German advance has been stopped.

At the cost of the desolation of their own country, Belgium has perhaps saved the flag of Britain, for where would it have flown on the seas if Germany had won?  And at the very least she has saved us from a war beside which this is nothing—­a war not now, but a few years hence, when she might have controlled half the Continent, and we should have stood alone.  We owe an incalculable debt to Belgium, and we can only repay it by throwing into this war every resource that our country has to offer.  For the only end which can bring peace to Europe is the total annihilation of Germany as a military and naval Power.  What other terms can be made with a nation which regards its most solemn treaties as so much waste paper, which is bound by no conventions, and which delights in showing a callous disregard of all that forms the basis of a civilized society?  The only guarantees that we can take are that she has no ships of war, and that her army is only sufficient to police her frontier.  The building of a war vessel or the boring of a gun must be regarded as a casus belli.  Then, and then only, shall Europe be safe from the madness that is tearing her asunder.