on either side, so far from leading in divergent directions, were much closer to each other than to their own followers.  The power of these leaders had enormously increased; but the distance between them had diminished, or, rather, disappeared.  It was said about 1800, in derision of the Foxite rump, that the Whig Party came down to Parliament in a four-wheeler.  It might literally be said in 1900 that the Whig Party and the Tory Party came to Parliament in a hansom cab.  It was not a case of two towers rising into different roofs or spires, but founded in the same soil.  It was rather the case of an arch, of which the foundation-stones on either side might fancy they were two buildings; but the stones nearest the keystone would know there was only one.  This “two-handed engine” still stood ready to strike, not, indeed, the other part of itself, but anyone who ventured to deny that it was doing so.  We were ruled, as it were, by a Wonderland king and queen, who cut off our heads, not for saying they quarrelled but for saying they didn’t.  The libel law was now used, not to crush lies about private life, but to crush truths about public life.  Representation had become mere misrepresentation; a maze of loopholes.  This was mainly due to the monstrous presence of certain secret moneys, on which alone many men could win the ruinous elections of the age, and which were contributed and distributed with less check or record than is tolerated in the lowest trade or club.  Only one or two people attacked these funds; nobody defended them.  Through them the great capitalists had the handle of politics, as of everything else.  The poor were struggling hopelessly against rising prices; and their attempts at collective bargaining, by the collective refusal of badly-paid work, were discussed in the press, Liberal and Tory, as attacks upon the State.  And so they were; upon the Servile State.

Such was the condition of England in 1914, when Prussia, now at last armed to the teeth and secure of triumph, stood up before the world, and solemnly, like one taking a sacrament, consecrated her campaign with a crime.  She entered by a forbidden door, one which she had herself forbidden—­marching upon France through neutralised Belgium, where every step was on her broken word.  Her neutralised neighbours resisted, as indeed they, like ourselves, were pledged to do.  Instantly the whole invasion was lit up with a flame of moral lunacy, that turned the watching nations white who had never known the Prussian.  The statistics of non-combatants killed and tortured by this time only stun the imagination.  But two friends of my own have been in villages sacked by the Prussian march.  One saw a tabernacle containing the Sacrament patiently picked out in pattern by shot after shot.  The other saw a rocking-horse and the wooden toys in a nursery laboriously hacked to pieces.  Those two facts together will be enough to satisfy some of us of the name of the Spirit that had passed.