that constrain freedom and by combined effort to destroy them. Democracy asserts that brute force should not be the arbiter in the relation of States, and therefore seeks to embody the principle of conciliation in international institutions. As the spirit of democracy will inform these international institutions and national self-determination is the guiding principle they will be the protectors of national freedom; and democracy, which is nourished on publicity, will demand that the free air of public discussion shall penetrate the obscurities of diplomacy. We realise further that there can be no true freedom so long as property and power are concentrated in the hands of a few, and the democratic watchword for the struggle of the future is "Through Equality to Freedom." We look to the democratisation of political institutions through a still wider extension of the franchise, the abolition of secret political funds, derived from the traffic in honours, and to the growth of industrial democracy, to enlarge the boundaries of freedom in this land, and to give the individual citizen a deeper sense of power and responsibility as the attributes of a free

man.

We know, too, that as the price of liberty is perpetual vigilance, so its surest safeguard is the passion for liberty in the hearts of men and women. To save this nation from the moral and political

servitude which makes the masses of people helpless agents of their own destruction and puts into the hands of the few more than the power of life and death is the settled resolve of organised democracy.

CHAPTER IX

VICTORY

VICTORY is a word on the lips of many people. It is a word which the statesmen of the Allied countries and of the Central Empires alike use quite freely, but with a very restricted application. To most the meaning of victory is limited to a striking military success. There is a grave danger that the moral as well as the social implications of victory may be forgotten or ignored. Any victory, however spectacular and dramatic in a military sense it may be, which falls short of the realisation of the ideals with which we entered the war, will not be a victory but a defeat. We strive for victory because we want to end war altogether, not merely to prove the superiority of British arms over those of Germany. We continue the struggle, dreadful though the cost of it has become, because we have to enforce reparation for a great wrong perpetrated upon a small unoffending nation, to liberate subject peoples and enable them to live under a form of government of their own

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choosing, and to destroy, not a great nation, but a militarist autocracy which had deliberately planned war without considering the interests either of their own people or of the European Commonwealth of which they were a part.

For the people of this country these are still the objects of the war. The ideals with which we entered the struggle have not been lowered. On the contrary the aims of the people, the ends for which they are prepared still to suffer and serve, obscured though they may be by the clamant imperialism of the dominant class, have become a rooted resolve. They will not suffer the war aims of this country to be transformed into a programme of conquest and annexation. They will sanction only such territorial and political changes in Europe, Asia, and Africa as will make possible the creation of a society of free nations pledged to maintain peace, protected by mutual guarantees, extended to the small nations as well as great, against oppression and unfair attack from any warlike state. In seeking to attain these ends we ought not to rely entirely upon forces in the field; nor ought we to deceive ourselves by thinking that a military victory, however complete and overwhelming, will suffice to establish an international order in which there is no danger of future war. We desire a victory

which cannot be won wholly by the armies in the field. Sufficient use has not been made of the moral, political and diplomatic weapons which the Allies have at their disposal. There is a danger of substituting military success and the desire for territory for noble ideals and great principles. In thus subordinating the moral to the material we mock the sacrifice of our heroic dead and forget God, for which no military success can make amends. Long before the war had reached this present stage, a great moral offensive should have been launched, supplementing the military effort, with the object of bringing home to the hearts and minds of the enemy peoples the real truth about the war. Since conscience and reason do not end upon the frontiers of Central Europe, the democratic case, which the leaders of the popular movement in the Allied countries could present to the social democracy of Germany, would prove convincing enough to shorten the war materially. It would clarify the real issues of the war in every country. It is a grave fault on the part of those who direct Allied policy that they have so far neglected to use political and diplomatic as well as military methods to achieve victory.

When victory in the sense of the collapse of the military power in the Central Empires is at last achieved, we shall be confronted with the task of