In that fashion nothing will ever get done.  There is no prosecution, but for all that I do not agree with Mr. Murray about the men he names.  These gentlemen are just comfortable gentlemen, own brothers to these old generals of ours who will not take off their spurs.  They are probably quite charming people except that they know nothing of that Fear of God which searches by heart.  Why should they bother?

So many of these after-the-war problems bring one back to the question of how far the war has put the Fear of God into the hearts of responsible men.  There is really no other reason in existence that I can imagine why they should ask themselves the question, “Have I done my best?” and that still more important question, “Am I doing my best now?” And so while I hear plenty of talk about the great reorganisations that are to come after the war, while there is the stir of doubt among the rentiers whether, after all, they will get paid, while the unavoidable stresses and sacrifices of the war are making many people question the rightfulness of much that they did as a matter of course, and of much that they took for granted, I perceive there is also something dull and not very articulate in this European world, something resistant and inert, that is like the obstinate rolling over of a heavy sleeper after he has been called upon to get up.  “Just a little longer....  Just for my time.”

One thought alone seems to make these more intractable people anxious.  I thrust it in as my last stimulant when everything else has failed.  “There will be frightful trouble with labour after the war,” I say.

They try to persuade themselves that military discipline is breaking in labour....

2

What does British labour think of the outlook after the war?

As a distinctive thing British labour does not think.  “Class-conscious labour,” as the Marxists put it, scarcely exists in Britain.  The only convincing case I ever met was a bath-chairman of literary habits Eastbourne.  The only people who are, as a class, class-conscious in the British community are the Anglican gentry and their fringe of the genteel.  Everybody else is “respectable.”  The mass of British workers find their thinking in the ordinary halfpenny papers or in John Bull. The so-called labour papers are perhaps less representative of British Labour than any other section of the press; the Labour Leader, for example, is the organ of such people as Bertrand Russell, Vernon Lee, Morel, academic rentiers who know about as much as of the labour side of industrialism as they do of cock-fighting.  All the British peoples are racially willing and good-tempered people, quite ready to be led by those they imagine to be abler than themselves.  They make the most cheerful and generous soldiers in the whole world, without insisting upon that democratic respect which the Frenchman exacts.  They do not criticise and they do not trouble themselves much about