LAND &? WATER 
December 5, 1918 
LAND&WATER 
5 Chancery Lane, London, fF.C.2. Tel. Htlhm liii 
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5, 191 8 
Contents 
page 
The Invasion of Holland (Cartoon) 
Raemaekers 
I 
Leading Articles 
2 
The Freebom of the Sk as 
Arthur Pollen 
3 
Clemenceau 
H. M. Hyndman 
6 
The Captured Pirates 
Charles Dixon 
8-9 
The Last Battles— and After.. 
Captain R. A. 
• 
Scott James, M.C 
. 10 
Industry and the State.. 
John Murray 
12 
The Stick 
A. A. Milne 
13 
The Intimate Essayist . . 
J. C. Squire 
15 
The Theatre ; The Purple Mask . . 
W. J. Turner 
16 
The Re.\der's Diary 
Peter Bell 
17 
"Service" for British Motorists 
H. Massac Buist 
18 
An Oriental Britain 
Francis Stopford 
20 
The Railway Shareholder 
Hartley Withers 
22 
Household Notes 
25 
Notes on Kit 
27 
The Election 
MARSHAL FOCH and the French President 
have visited London in triumph ; President 
Wilson is coining ; the Allies are on German 
soil ; the tale of surrendered submarines is 
mounting up. But it would be hypocrisy to 
pretend that the movement of the great world-story is 
not for the time being obscured here by a far Less important 
thing, namely, the General Election. The supreme argu- 
ments against an election in war time always were that it 
would preoccupy ministers who ought to be doing something 
else, that it would destroy national unity, and that it might 
crystallise and magnify differences of opinion about the war. 
The great crisis has passed ; the war is (we all assume) over ; 
but similar arguments apply, though less forcibly. Happily, 
our peace terms are too precise and too generally agreed 
upon for a really serious division of opinion over them to 
have been revealed. Nevertheless, election conditions offer 
men every temptation to exaggerate such differences of 
opinion as exist ; the new Government will not even be 
able to pretend to have more than the "larger half" of the 
country and the House of Commons at its back ; and the 
party Government of a confessedly divided England cannot 
carry the weight that the two old Coalitions have done. 
Finally, when "the conduct of the Peace" — as vital a matter 
as "the conduct of the war" — should be engaging the whole 
attention of ministers, they are spending their time running 
about the country making speeches, examining the credentials 
of candidates, vilifying their opponents, and desperately 
endeavouring to make sure that the electorate will not, in 
some strange aberration, dislodge them from the position 
from which nobody desired to evict them until the Peace 
Congress had concluded its deliberations and we could, 
without grave risk, return again to our domestic feuds. 
Its Result 
Ostensibly the Election was going to be held to give Mr. 
Lloyd George a mandate for the Peace Congress. Except 
that the country is impressing on him the necessity of dealing 
with the Kaiser and of getting as much damages out of the 
Germans as they are physically able to pay (matters about 
which the opinion of our people need never have been sup- 
posed to be in doubt), the Election is throwing no light at 
all on the Peace Terms, which arc not being, in detail, dis- 
cussed. Most of them are taken for granted ; those which 
are still in debate (such as the precise adjustment of the 
Italian and the Jugo-Slav claims) are too difficult and 
(to the ordinary voter) remote to be elucidated from election 
platforms. Mr. George had as good a' mandate before as he 
will have now ; it was the same mandate as any other Prime 
Minister would have taken to Versailles ; and the Election 
will certainly not strengthen his position there. That he 
will probably get a large majority of supporters in the House 
will be due not so much an increase of his popularity which 
(largely owing to the general dislike of this premature Election 
and its squalid concomitants) is, for the time being, at least, 
noticeably on the wane. It will be due to the general English 
feeling that we must have the solidest possible Government 
at a time like this, that there is no alternative Government 
even dimly in sight, and that a leap away from Mr. Lloyd 
George's Coalition would be the leap into the dark. Hundreds 
of thousands of electors will vote for the Coalition Government 
because they cannot imagine any other Government ; the 
actions of hundreds of thousands of others will be determined 
by their conviction that the CoaUtion is going to win, 
and that whoever is going to win at such a time ought to 
win handsomely. Meanwhile, as these hnes appear, some 
thousands of candidates, with an unprecedented variety of 
labels, will be going through the forms of nomination. As we 
scrutinise the lists in all their complexity and puzzhng 
novelty, our certitude about the result for a moment fades, 
and we feel that so singular an Election, held under such 
novel conditions, with split votes general, and no pre- 
cautions taken against minority victories, with a hundred 
discontents and doubts flowing in incomputable strength 
through the hearts and minds of the masses of the people, 
may produce some result entirely unexpected, a chaos of 
representation from which order will only gradually be 
evolved. 
Punishing the Kaiser 
It is now virtually certain that the Allies will insist upon 
obtaining the body of the Kaiser from the Dutch. The 
legalists are disputing as to ways and means. It surely is 
clear that in the last resort we could compel the Germans 
themselves to demand his extradition on the gravest criminal 
charge ; but in a cace like this few people are going to worry 
about the precise legal processes, or fictions, employed ; 
what is certain is that, if there is a world-wide demand for 
the execution of justice upon him he cannot be allowed to 
escape trial by taking up his abode on neutral soil. The 
autocrats were always enthusiastic for international measures 
which would leave the small penniless Anarchist no safe 
place on which to lay his head ; and what is sauce for Gomez 
or Dubois in Soho or Barcelona is sauce for the Imperial 
Anarchist in Amerongen. The sophisticated classes have 
debated about Wilhelm's guilt ; some argue that he was 
really only a figure-head, that he was more vain than blood- 
thirsty, and that we cannot judge kings by the standards of 
ordinary men. But the Allied democracies have never had 
any doubt about it. The common Englishman and English- 
woman obstinately persist in holding a man morally respon- 
sible for his actions. Since Wilhelm insisted on his autocratic' 
power and the supreme necessity of maintaining his dynasty 
and preserving his dynasty's spoils, even at the cost of millions 
of lives, they are content to take him at his word ; they do 
not think it is any paUiation to say that it was out of childish 
vanity and not lust for slaughter that he conspired to devas- 
tate Europe. And even if they were persuaded that he 
could not have stopped the war, they would not agree that 
that justified him in assenting to it ; for a man cannot 
innocently assist an intending murderer merely because he 
thinks the criminal will succeed in killing his victim. The 
populace in England, in France, and in America will insist 
on having the Kaiser tried ; and tried he will be. Whether 
or not hanging \('ould be the most salutary pimishment for 
him is a moot point ; there is something to be said for the 
view that the gilt of meretricious romance would be more 
thoroughly taken off him and his kind if he were given a 
short term of bag-sewing or oakum-picking witlTthe low- 
down thieves and ruffians in an ordinary Enghsh prison. 
