The basis of peace negotiations must necessarily be settled in advance
by representatives of all the allied Governments in conclave. The
mandate of each Government in regard to the conclave is the affair of
that Government, and it is the affair of no other Government. The
mandate of our Government is, therefore, the affair of our Government,
and the allied Governments are just as much entitled to criticise or
object to it as we, for example, are entitled to suggest to the Czar how
he ought to behave in Finland. Our Government, being a democratic
Government, has no right to go into conclave without a mandate from the
people who elected it. It possesses no mandate of the kind. It has a
mandate, and a mighty one, to prosecute the war, and it is prosecuting
the war to the satisfaction of the majority of the electorate. But a
peace treaty is a different and an incomparably more important thing. Up
to the present the mind of the nation has found no expression, and it
probably will not find any expression unless the Government recognizes
fairly that it is a representative Government and behaves with the
deference which is due from a representative Government. As matters
stand, the mandate of the British Government will come, not from
Britain, but from Russia and France.

The great argument drawn from the Government's alleged duty to the
allied Governments is, no doubt, reinforced, in the minds of Ministers
and at Cabinet meetings, by two subsidiary arguments. The first of these
rests in the traditional assumption that all international politics must
be committed, perpetrated, and accomplished in secret. This strange
traditional notion will die hard, but some time it will have to die, and
at the moment of its death excellent and sincere persons will be
convinced that the knell of the British Empire has sounded. The knell of
the British Empire has frequently sounded. It sounded when capital
punishment was abolished for sheep-stealing, when the great reform bill