changed. Hatred of Germany and fear for our Allies' steadfastness
occupied the foremost place in his mind. Victory was the objective and
his definition of victory was borrowed from the prize-ring. A better
world had to wait. He became more and more reckless. There was a time
when his indignation against Lord Kitchener was almost uncontrollable.
For Mr. Asquith he never entertained this violent feeling, but gradually
lost patience with him, and only decided that he must go when
procrastination appeared to jeopardize "a knock-out blow."

Anyone who questioned the cost of the war was a timid soul. What did it
matter what the war cost so long as victory was won? Anyone who
questioned the utter recklessness which characterized the Ministry of
Munitions was a mere fault-finder. I spoke to him once of the unrest in
factories, where boys could earn £15 and £16 a week by merely watching a
machine they knew nothing about, while the skilled foremen, who alone
could put those machines right, and who actually invented new tools to
make the new machines of the inventors, were earning only the fixed wage
of fifty shillings a week. I thought this arrangement made for unrest
and must prove dangerous after the war. So eager, so hot was his mind on
the end, that he missed the whole point of my remark. "What does it
matter," he exclaimed impatiently, "what we pay those boys as long as we
win the war?"

And the end of it was the humiliation of the General Election in 1918.
Where was the new world, then? He was conscious only of Lord
Northcliffe's menace. Germany must pay and the Kaiser must be tried!
There was no trumpet note in those days, and there has been no trumpet
note since. Imagine how Gladstone would have appealed to the conscience
of his countrymen! Was there ever a greater opportunity in
statesmanship? After a victory so tremendous, was there any demand on