November 6, 1915. 
LAND AND W A T K R 
In the years preceding the war there was being 
voiced from many quarters a serious demand for 
a saner and cleaner poUtics ; here, with a bitterness 
and exaggeration which repeUed the sober, there 
with a certain naive hopefulness which made the 
worldly-wise impatient. It would indeed be 
foolish to approach our desperate task of the future 
in any mood of highly attenuated idealism. It has 
to be admitted that in a complex world further 
complicated by our mismanagement, the guileless 
idealist fares badly. Politics, international or 
domestic, is at bottom a conflict of selfish interests ; 
an affair of claims and counter-claims ; not the 
pursuit or expression of definite ethical ideals. 
It does not achieve the absolute best, but finds 
(and is altogether too much in the habit of seeking) 
the tolerable compromise. Political extremists, 
and all successful pohticians tend to be extremists, 
are prone to attempt to present complex issues 
in some crudely simple formula and to manufacture 
the convenient shibboleth ; to overstate their own 
and distort their adversary's case. It is the old 
bad trick of forensic advocacy — and as inevitable. 
And so, thoughtful and temperate folk who are 
unable to take these black-and-white x'e.vs., are 
exasperated, estranged, and not a little con- 
temptuous. 
But this, after all, is only one side of the 
matter. Across this rough web of work-a-day 
politics there runs a fine woof of gold. Behipd 
the professional stalwarts, the hedgers and the 
ditchers, the placemen and the men of phrases. 
there arc sincere and exalted idealists, Imperial, 
Radical, Socialist, who occasionally contrive to 
push the sohd practical men into some spiritual 
adventure for honour or justice sake. Even the 
politicians sans phrase arc in the main better than 
their machine — as we know. And anyway, this is 
certain truth ; that the more we of the " common 
people " can feel and promote an honest desire 
for good and sane government, for the considera- 
tion of real as against artificial issues, for the 
cutting out 01 nii:c!iievous anomalies, extrava- 
gances and pri\'ileges, and the removal of intoler- 
able disabilities, the cleaner and less barren our 
politics will be. If it must still be a conflict of 
.sclfrli interests, by letting in light we can make 
it at least a conflict of enlightened interests. 
But surely, even in the very admission which 
we have in candour to make of the perversities 
and obliquities of politics, we must recognise that 
this fateful time of war puts into our hearts a better 
hope. Never in our day has there been such a 
field for the idealist, so he be practical and 
knowledgeable. War the great destroyer should 
also be, is already proving itself, the great purifier. 
A good deal of rubbish must be burn+ v.p in its 
devouring flame. We shall be faced with such 
stark realities, such poignant problems, that there 
will be much less room for the disingenuous 
manoeuvres of cliques and parties. It is true 
there are not wanting signs that the extremist 
advocates of the exploited in that eternal struggle 
against privilege and property, both the passion- 
ately sincere and the mere fishers in troubled 
waters, are working for a wrecking policy which 
shall but bring us out of one bitter war into a 
bitterer ; but there are good hopes (and there must 
be good work) that better counsels will prevail, 
and that the essen'ial solidarity and intimate kin- 
ship which the war has revealed — no phrases these, 
but a shining reality — will give us for a time at 
least an honourable truce in which to rebuild the 
ruins of our world. 
A nation not less than an individual of 
character, should rise the stronger out of adversity. 
It is surely no vain dream that a humbler, more 
righteous (yet not self-righteous) Britain shall be 
born again of all this desperate travail. 
For it is now, thus suddenly, a nation of 
educated men, of men who have been forced 
to see problems in a new light, have tested 
and readjusted their values, have found tqeir 
futile ambitions exposed and bankrupt — which 
is indeed education in the most significant sense. 
A time of suspended plans, of enforced, relative 
leisure has come to many. That leisure can be 
used in planning the future. When action is in 
abeyance thought which is the mainspring of 
just action comes to its own, thought which the 
crowded routine of our old life with its accu- 
mulated preoccupations provided only too little 
occasion or desire. 
Here is the plain truth, that every recon- 
structive task of the future will be undermanned. 
Who then that urges every fit youth into the battle 
line can dare to stand out of the civic counter- 
part of the soldier's work ? We shall have lost 
many of our best in the flower of their manhood 
and at the height of their spiritual reach. Victory 
when it comes will not come as a glory — but only 
as a relief, a pause, a prelude to a stupendous 
endeavour. It will find the British heritage 
strengthened by a common heroism, welded by 
an immeasurable danger shared, but anxious and 
fatigued. Problems of immense urgency will 
clamour for solution. There must at once rise the 
too-long deferred question of the Imperial Settle- 
ment, the making of the Five Nations into the 
greater Commonwealth. 
Nearer home there is the peaceful confirmation 
of the Irish settlement to ensure. Of the more 
intimate domestic problems, the threatening of 
that standard of living, inadequate as it is, which 
the poorer class has by a long and arduous upward 
struggle attained, is the most urgent in its gravity 
and implications ; aggravated as it is by with- 
drawal from production of so many who must be 
generously pensioned, and by the inevitable drying 
up of those sources of charity by which in the past 
so many works of mercy have been made possible. 
A thousand old and new needs, physical, educational, 
industrial, constitutional — and a harassed treasury 
to meet them. But out of all this comes the 
brave hope that in rebuilding we shall build 
immeasurably better. Else we shall indeed have 
bled in vain. 
Readers of Land and Water have followed 
the course of the difficult European campaign in 
these pages not bj' any casual pictorial method, 
but in studied detail with a sustained and patient 
attention. We venture the hope that a com- 
mentar}', chiefly on post-bellum problems will 
not be unwelcome, offered as it is in a serious 
but in no sense a dogmatic mood, to provide 
matter for intelligent reflection : and perhaps in 
these great times there need be no too shame- 
faced apology for a certain seriousness of intention. 
To that weekly commentary these paragraphs 
may §erve as a general introduction. 
