In our daily meetings one with another we cried aloud for a great voice to awaken the little folk in Great Britain from their selfish lethargy--the little folk in high office, in smug burgessdom, in seditious factory and shipyard.

They were months of sordid bargaining between all sections of our national life, in the murk of which the glow of patriotism seemed to be eclipsed.

And in the meantime, the heroic millions from all corners of our far-flung Empire were giving their lives on land and sea, gaily and gallantly, too often in tragic futility, for the ideals to which the damnable little folk at home were blind.

The little traitorous folk who gambled for their own hands in politics, the little traitorous folk who put the outworn shibboleths of a party before the war-cry of an Empire, the little traitorous folk who strove with all their power to starve our navy of ships, our ships of coal, our men in the trenches of munitions, our armies of men, our country of honour--all these will one day be mercilessly arraigned at the bar of history.

The plains of France, the steeps of Gallipoli, the swamps of Mesopotamia, the Seven Seas will give up their dead as witnesses.
We spoke bitterly of all these things and thought of them with raging impotence; but the even tenor of our life went on.