July 27/' 1915 
LAND & WATER 
LAND & WATER 
EMPIRE HOUSE, KINGSWAY, LONDON, W.C 
Telephone: HOLBORN 2828 
THURSDAY, JULY 27. 1916 
CONTENTS 
The Prisoners. By Louis Raemaekers 
Ireland and the War. (Leading Article) 
The British Offensive. By Hilaire Belloc 
The Nation's Thanks. By Arthur Pollen 
Bernhardi. By Colonel Feyler 
An Essay in Flight. By Joseph Thorp 
On the Edge of the Desert. By Gerard Shaw- 
Letters to a Lonely Civilian 
English Farming. By an American Farmer 
The Value of a Club 
By a Mountain Bog. By W. T. Palmer 
Greenmantle. By John Buchan 
The West End 
Town and Country 
Choosing Kit 
PAGE 
I 
4 
9 
II 
12 
13 
14 
15 
17 
18 
19 
22 
24 
xiii. 
IRELAND AND THE WAR 
THE whole of judgment consists in proportion. 
The fool and the cunning man are both dis- 
tinguished from the wise man, not by their 
inferior knowledge of certain facts, but by the 
respective weight they give to each of those facts. But 
the task of judging wisely in public affairs is always 
heavier by far than the corresponding task in private 
affairs, because the scale of the problems involved is so 
much greater. A man may have a good eye for the 
acreage of a field, or a good judgment upon the propor- 
tions of a room, but the same man will find it very 
difficult not to exaggerate the importance of the nearer 
objects in a great landscape, or to realise over what vast 
distances the remote plains of his view may range. 
Our public life even now after two years of War 
necessarily feels the effects of controversies which 
arose long before the enormous circumstance of 
to-day. It necessarily feels the imprint, far too 
recent to have faded, of debates which, if they could 
only be seen in their relation to the gigantic struggle 
in Europe, would suddenly fall to insignificance. 
It necessarily suffers from an exaggeration of particular 
cases and particular personalities, the position and value 
of which were only slightly exaggerated when they formed, 
as they did but some few years ago, the sole matter of 
public debate, but which now really bear no comparison 
with the magnitude of the national danger and of the 
necessity for national triumph. Historians} have always 
marvelled at the way in which what are obviously minor 
details have been allowed in the past to thwart or, at any 
rate, to disarrange the conduct of a great nation in some 
crisis of its fate. 
You have the example, for instance, of Prussia standing 
aloof from the Great Alliance in the year of Austerlitz, 
and inevitably suffering in the next year, 1806, the 
chastisement of Jena. You have the example twelve 
years before of the British contingent withdrawn from the 
Austrian command for the adventure of Dunkirk, with 
the inevitable result of the French victories that followed. 
You have the Dutch Commissioners in the very turning 
of the tide against Loins XIV. 's power perpetually 
haggling for details even of procedure, when the one 
thing essential to the safety of their country was close 
union with the British policy, and when their salvation 
was only to be effected by the genius of Marlborough. 
Now there is some danger that to-day we also in this 
country should suffer from such a misapprehension of 
values, and that the magnitude of the war and the 
necessity — for it is no less — of united and if possible 
undisturbed government during its progress %vill be 
forgotten or undervalued on account of what has been 
for long an acute, but is after all, only a domestic, pro- 
blem. Such a misapprehension of values upon the part 
of the public is unlikely — though the revival of the Irish 
controversy might lead to such a thing. But on the 
part of individual politicians it is only too probable. 
And it would be well, we think, if before entering on 
any adventures, those even who are most opposed to a 
present settlement of Irish affairs should consider the 
alternative. It is true that the war has now entered a 
phase in which political disturbances or reconstruction 
at home will no longer be necessarily disastrous. But 
such a disturbance would be necessarily weakening. 
The moment is the most ill-chosen of all for exhibiting 
to our enemies any disarraj^ in our forces ; for suggesting 
a change of policy, though domestic in its origin, which 
our enemy might hope to sec reacting upon the general 
conduct of the war, and for bewildering our Allies with a 
spectacle which — small blame to them ! — they cannot 
understand. 
To judge the truth of these remarks it is surely suffi- 
cient to consider how opinion would judge the matter 
if there had taken place in the past an actual invasion of 
these islands,, and if any portion of our soil were und«r 
the occupation of the enemy. That is the position in 
which the French have found themselves for now two 
years. It is the position in which the ItaUans recently 
found themselves. It is the position in which our Russian 
Allies have found themselves. In their eyes any con- 
siderable domestic change — any changes of government 
not directly connected with the conduct of the war would be 
as disturbing as it would be inexplicable. 
But there is no need to take so violent an instance. 
It is almost enough to point out that public opinion, as 
it stands, would never comprehend such a confusion at 
such a moment. The war has by this time penetrated 
so deeply into the consciousness of the whole nation in 
its most tragic as in its most glorious aspect ; it has so 
nearly concerned every class, and we had almost said 
every member of every class, that any comparison be- 
tween it and the political controversies of a few years 
past has in it something of the grotesque. Men who 
should allow those controversies to reappear in the narrow 
arena of political life would be altogether miscalculating 
the general mind of their fellow citizens. Nothing could 
tend to discredit more the already uncertain moral 
foundations of Parliamentary Government. Nothing 
would show a greater contrast between the mind of the 
Parliamentarians at Westminster and the mind of the 
average Enghshman outside. 
We do not write this under the conception that the 
error will be committed. We do not believe that the 
new Irish controversy will be allowed at such a moment 
as this to affect the constitution, still less to affect the 
policy of the Government. The whole energy of the 
nation as a whole and of all those which direct it can in 
the nature of things be turned to only one object, and 
that object is victory upon the Continent : The supply 
of munitionment ; the severity of the Blockade ; the 
hearty support of the Alliance ; the meeting of the enemy 
propaganda in neutral fields ; the attraction of forces 
hitherto neutral — these are the matters with which the 
nation is alone concerned and with which it will not 
tolerate the admixture of things altogether less in moment. 
Whatever deflects us, however slightly, from the common 
goal is a weakness ; and the nation is sufficiently alive 
to this truth to forbid such weakness at such a time. 
I 
