William Le Queux

“ There is a rising feeling of wrath, as well as a belief that the peril from within with which the country is faced—the peril of the thousands of enemy aliens in our midst—most of whom are not under control—together with the whole army of spies ready and daily awaiting, in impatience, the signal to strike simultaneously—is wilfully disregarded. Even the police themselves—no finer body of men than whom exists anywhere in the world—openly express disgust at the appalling neglect of the mysterious so-called "authorities" to deal with the question with a firm and strong hand. ”

“ Their health and their strength will have gone; there will be no places for them in the world where men in full health and strength fight the battle of life in the fields of commerce and industry. Are we doing enough—have we, indeed, begun to do anything—for these poor victims of war's fury, much more to be pitied than the gallant men who sleep for ever where they fell on the battlefields of France and Belgium?
Too often in the past it has been the shame and the reproach of Britain that she cast aside, like worn-out garments, the men who have spent their health and strength in her cause. ”

“ THE PERIL OF "MUDDLING THROUGH"
Has Britain, in the course of her long history, ever been prepared for a great war? I do not believe she has; she certainly was not ready last August, when the Kaiser launched his thunderbolt upon the world.
Perhaps, paradoxical as it may seem, this perpetual unreadiness may be, in a sense, part of Britain's strength.
We are a people slow of speech, and slow to anger. It takes much—very much—to rouse the British nation to put forth its full strength. ”

“ What added price, I wonder, shall we be compelled to pay for that inexplicable delay, not merely in the increased cost of the necessaries of life at home and the expenses of the war abroad, but in the lives of our fighting men? For it must not be forgotten that a decisive blow at Turkey would do much to shorten the duration of the war. It would be a serious blow at Germany, and would be more than likely to precipitate the entrance into the struggle, on the side of the Allies, of Italy and the wavering Balkan States. In hard cash, the war is costing us nearly a million and a half a day. ”

“ Read the daily newspapers, and learn the lesson of how the public are being daily deluded by false assertions that all is well, and that we have great Imperial Germany—the country which has, for twenty years, plotted against us—in the hollow of our hand.
The public are not told the real truth, and there lies the grave scandal which must be apparent to every person in the country. But, I ask, will the malevolent influence which is protecting the alien enemy among us, and refusing to allow inquiry into spying, ever permit the truth to be told? ”

“ We are the enemy! France and Russia are merely incidental foes. It is England that stands between Germany and the realisation of her insane dream of world dominion, and unless Great Britain to-day completes, with British thoroughness, the task to which she has set her hand, this generation, and the generations that are to come, will never be freed from the blighting shadow of Teutonic megalomania. It is quite conceivable that a peace which would be satisfactory to Russia and France would be profoundly unsatisfactory to us. ”

“ Just so long as the British Fleet holds the command of the sea, Germany's foreign trade is in the paralysing grip of an incubus which cannot be shaken off. In the meantime, all the seas of all the world are free to our ships and our commerce, and, though the volume of world-trade is necessarily diminished by the war, there remains open to British manufacturers an enormous field which has been tilled hitherto mainly by German firms. ”

“ If this war has proved one thing more clearly than another, it has proved that the German is utterly and absolutely unfit to exercise power, that he is restrained by no moral consideration from perpetuating the most shocking abominations in pursuit of his aims, that the most sacred obligations are as dust in the balance when they conflict with his supposed interests. It has proved too, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that England is the real object of Germany's foaming hate. ”

“ We, more than any other nation, depend upon the issue of this war to make our existence, as a people and an Empire, safe for a hundred years to come. Have we so energetically pushed on the preparations that, by the time winter is upon us again, we shall, with the help of our gallant Allies, have dealt Germany such a series of crushing blows as to compel her to accept a peace which shall be satisfactory to us? ”

“ It is as certain as the rising of tomorrow's sun that, when this war is over, Germany would, if the power were left within her, embark at once on a new campaign of revenge. We have seen how, for forty-five long years, the French have cherished in their hearts the hope of recovering the fair provinces wrested from them in the war of 1870–1871. And the French, be it remembered, are not a nation capable of nourishing a long-continued national hatred. Generous, proud, and intensely patriotic they are; malicious and revengeful they emphatically are not. ”

“ We are glad, of course, to learn of the success, but would it not be well for the nation to learn of the failure? Can it be supposed for an instant that the Germans do not know? Is it giving away military information of value to the enemy to publish here in Great Britain news with which they are already perfectly well acquainted? Is it not rather that in their anxiety to say smooth things the authorities deliberately suppress the news of reverses, and tell us only the story of our triumph? ”

“ That a strict censorship should be exercised over military news which might prove of value to the enemy will be cheerfully admitted by every one. We all know, despite official assurances to the contrary, that German spies are still active in our midst, and, even now, there is—or at any rate until quite recently there was—little or no difficulty in sending information from this country to Germany. No one will cavil at any restrictions necessary to prevent the enemy anticipating our plans and movements, and if the censorship had not gone beyond this, no one would have had any reason to complain. ”

“ The real remedy lies in the hands of the people. Democracy may not bring us unmixed blessings, but it does, at least, mean that, in the long run, the will of the people must rule. If the people insist on the truth, the truth must be told, and in so insisting the people of England, I firmly believe, will be doing a great work for themselves, for our Empire, and for the cause of civilisation. ”

“ Our persistent policy of unreadiness has simply meant that for four, five, or six long months we have not been ready to take the field with the forces imperatively necessary if the Germans are to be hurled, neck and crop, out of Belgium and France across the Rhine, and their country finally occupied and subjugated.
Already another new and graver peril is threatening us—the peril of a premature and inconclusive peace. Already the voice of the pacifist—that strangely constituted being to whom the person of the enemy is always sacred—is being heard in the land. ”

“ Already the plea is going up that Germany must not be "crushed"—that Germany, who has made Belgium a howling wilderness, who has massacred men, women, and even little children, in sheer cold-blooded lust, shall be treated with the mild consideration we extend to a brave and honourable opponent. Sure it is, therefore, that if Britain retires from this war with her avowed purpose unfulfilled, we shall have been guilty of muddling compared with which the worst we have ever done in the past will be the merest triviality. ”

“ What we can do, and ought to do, is to make sure that, at whatever cost of blood and treasure to us, Germany is deprived of any further capacity to menace the peace of the world. It is the plain and obvious duty of the Allies to see that the hateful and purely German doctrine that might is the only right shall, once and for all, be swept from the earth. ”

“ There is an apathy towards any peril of invasion that is astounding.
Of our military measures, pure and simple, I shall say nothing except that it is the bounden duty of every Briton to place implicit reliance upon Lord Kitchener and the military authorities and, if necessary, to assist them by every means in his power. We can do no good by criticising measures of the true meaning of which we know nothing. ”

“ There is much in our apathy which is more than foolish—it is criminal. Had the country, ten years ago, listened to the warnings of Lord Roberts and others, instead of being immersed in their own pleasure-seeking and money-grubbing, we should have had no war. The public, who are happily to-day filled with a spirit of patriotism because they have learnt wisdom by experience, now realise their error. ”

“ We are assured that the Allies can stand the financial strain better than Germany. Possibly; but the point is that no one knows just how much strain Germany can stand before she breaks, and in war it is only common prudence to prepare for the worst that can befall. This is precisely what we, most emphatically, are not doing to-day. Thanks to the reasons I have given—the chief of which is the unwarrantable official secrecy and the wholly unjustifiable "cooking" of the news—the British public is not yet fully aroused to the deadly peril in which the nation and the Empire stand. ”

“ It is, or should be, the function of the Press Bureau not merely to supply the public with accurate news, but to make sure that false or misleading reports are promptly suppressed. The reason for this is obvious. We do not wish to be depressed by unfounded stories of disaster, nor do we wish to experience the inevitable reaction which follows when we learn that we have been deluded by false news of a great victory. ”

“ Are we to muddle the business of making peace as we muddled the preparations for war? If we do we shall, assuredly, deserve the worst fate that can be reserved for a nation which deliberately shuts its eyes to the logic of plain and demonstrable fact.
Germany can never be adequately punished for the crimes against God and man which she has committed in Belgium and France. ”

“ The terrible mauling sustained by the German squadron, the loss of the Blucher and the battering of the Seydlitz and Derffinger, may have done a good deal to drive home into the German mind the conviction that in the face of an unbeaten—and to Germany unbeatable—battle-fleet, the invasion of England would be, at the very best, an undertaking of the most hazardous nature which would be foredoomed to failure and in which the penalty would be annihilation. ”

“ In the past, Germany's chief weapon against us has been her commercial enterprise and activity. It should now be part of our business to prevent her harming us in the future, and, in the commercial field, the strongest weapon in our armoury has hitherto remained unsheathed. Shall we, in the days that are to come, do our imperial trading on a great family scale—British goods the most favoured in British markets—or shall we here again "muddle through" on a policy which gives the stranger and the enemy alien at least as friendly a welcome as we extend to our own sons? ”

“ The Government have taken power to raise the British Army to a total of three million men. In our leisurely way we have begun to make new armies in the face of an enemy who for fifty years has been training every man to arms, in the face of an enemy who for ten or fifteen years at least has been steadily, openly, and avowedly preparing for the Day when he could venture, with some prospect of success, to challenge the sea supremacy by which we live, and move, and have our being, and lay our great Empire in the dust. ”

“ The truth, which cannot be disguised, is that by the Government's present policy, and the amusing vagaries of its Press Censorship, the public are daily growing more and more apathetic concerning the war. While, on the one hand, we see recruiting appeals in all the clever guises of smart modern advertising, yet on the other, by the action of the authorities themselves, the man-in-the-street is being soothed into the belief that all goes well, and that, in consequence, no more men are needed and nobody need worry further. ”