There must be an element of riot in our eating and drinking if we are to drive dull care away.  That is the defence of cakes and ale.  Cakes, no doubt, are not what they used to be, and ale is even less so.  But human beings are symbolists, and, if you give them something that looks like cakes and something that looks like beer, it is surprising how content they will be.  Our eating and drinking is but a game, and we deceive ourselves at table like children among their toys.  Even the vegetarian lies his food into grandeur not its own.  There is a vegetarian restaurant in London in which one of the dishes on the bill of fare bears the name “Like chicken.” Splendide mendax!

One of the most amazing features in the appearance of London at the present time is surely the absence of the signs of widespread mourning.  The windows of the shops are full of all the colours of the parrot.  The hats are as bright as a scrap-book.  The confectioners’ shops are making a desperate effort to look as if nothing had happened.  The death of a single monarch would have darkened Christmas in Regent Street more effectually than the million mournings of the war.  It is as though we were eager to conceal from ourselves the news of this terrible disaster.  After all, to judge by the crowds in the streets, most people still remain alive.  We have sworn we will never forget those others, but one has only to read some of the election speeches to see that with many of us our own greed and vindictiveness are already ousting the ideals for which hundreds of thousands of men gave up their lives.  Can it be that we are feeling gay not only because we have escaped from the disasters of the war but because we are escaping from the ideals of the war?  It is as though we had returned from the barren snows of the mountain-tops to the cosy plenty of the valleys.  We are glad to exchange the stars as companions for the nearer illuminations of the streets.  The familiar world is coming back, and civilian youths have begun once more to sing music-hall choruses on the way home on the tops of buses:—­

     So I dillied,
     And dallied,
     And dallied,
     And dillied;
     But you can’t trust a speshul
     Like an old-time copper
     When you can’t find your way home.

Peace had returned without question when nonsense of this venerable kind sped into the air from the roof of a late bus.  Well, we have always wanted the world to be “as usual.”  We were angry with the Germans for plunging us into the unusualness of war, and we feel scarcely more friendly to those who would plunge us into the unusualness of Utopia.  We feel at home among neither horrors nor ideals.  We are glad at the prospect of having the old world back rather than at having to make a new world.  Lord Birkenhead, I observe, declares that it would be an awful thing if the war had left us unchanged, but we look in vain for signs of any deep change even in the speeches of Lord Birkenhead.  One noticeable