392 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



allegiance to his party cannot compel him to vote against his 

 own opinion in great matters; for if he is false in small matters, 

 he may also be false in great ones. The very nature of party 

 means that the partisan shall be false in some matters; how, 

 therefore, do we know that he will not be false in all ? 



The party-politicians refused to take the advice of the best 

 experts. They adopted the absurd hypothesis that without any 

 power of striking effectively they could maintain the position 

 of the empire in the midst of other fully-armed nations. Many 

 experts have even doubted whether they could maintain an 

 entirely safe defensive with a navy alone — but they would not 

 listen. The great moral law that every male citizen is bound to 

 train himself for the defence of his country did not appeal to 

 them Their partisans who, if this evident law had been accepted 

 by them, would have themselves been obliged to undertake such 

 training, perhaps to their own personal loss and discomfort, 

 invented every possible sophistry and false statement to discredit 

 the law. It was not proper, they said, that every man should do 

 his duty ; it was better that the dutiful should die for the un- 

 dutiful ! But even though they rejected universal training they 

 might at least have ensured the possession of a sufficient army 

 of volunteers — ensured it by adequate payment and other advant- 

 ages, by sufficient training, by the provision of means for supply- 

 ing enough armaments and clothing, artillery and officers, for a 

 larger army in case of need. They should have mastered the 

 principles of war as the Germans had done, and should have 

 made long beforehand every possible arrangement in the case of 

 an outbreak. Almost all of these they neglected — at least as far 

 as our military forces were concerned. That the whole exist- 

 ence of the empire was endangered by this neglect did not move 

 them — that, in the case of any war, successful or not, the State 

 would be put to enormous inconvenience and expense, that our 

 sailors and soldiers would be destroyed by hundreds of thou- 

 sands, and that the whole of civilisation might be set back for 

 years. Their excuse was invariably that of expense, and they 

 even reduced our small standing army on that account — though 

 they did not hesitate to give themselves from a quarter to a half 

 a million pounds a year, and squandered enormous sums on 

 policies which have too often proved to be of little advantage to 

 any one. They scoffed at the military experts and even at the 

 great soldier who led them. And indeed it is not only military 



