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magnificent effort of sacrifice and service, a disaster might have
fallen upon the world which could never have been retrieved.
But will that inexorable court of cold investigation be able to
say that we had no responsibility for the conditions which have
precipitated this Day of Judgment; that for ten, twenty, fifty
years we had ceased to be a people that delighted in war ?
Our first task is to reconstruct the nation. We have to
zxorcise the spirit of war from our own domestic life. In a
company of women I make no apology for recalling that great
sex movement, the sad manifestations of which but a year ago
had filled our minds with perplexity and amazement, but which
to most of us now appear almost as a dream when one awaketh.
Nothing was easier under stress of that bitter conflict than boldly
to assert that force is no remedy, and that militant methods in the
long run defeat their own end. It was, I repeat, a short and easy
method of extricating ourselves from the difficulties in which the
controversy had involved us, to wash our hands of a business that
had resulted in violence, which is the negation of the very
foundations upon which society rests. But there were some who
were willing to incur resentment by appearing to condone
actions which they condemned perhaps more deeply than their
detractors. They believed profoundly in spiritual methods. Nor
would they to-day be found as exponents of that bellicose
attitude, which is by some mistaken for true patriotism. But
they saw, or they thought they saw, that to range themselves
unreservedly on the side of those who, in the name of law and
order, called for nothing but repression was really to take their
place as combatants in a war that was rending the national life.
And the same was true, I think, of those great labour wars—the
coal strike, the transport strike, and the like—which were shaking
the social fabric to its very basis, and the further progress of which
nothing but the terrible preoccupation of the European struggle
has interrupted. Men could denounce with vehemence the want
of discipline, the envy, the malice of those sections of the
population which were demanding a fuller recognition in the body
politic, or a larger share in the distribution of material wealth,
and no one could say that their denunciations were entirely devoid
of truth. But what they could not see was that deep in the heart
of our vaunted civilization there were principles, which were
the fruitful parents of disorder, just because they were essentially
anti-social and gave the semblance of law to the spirit of war.
Well, for the present at least these troubles are a thing of the
past. But of this we may be certain that, unless we as a nation
are determined to go right down to the foundations upon which
social justice and the common welfare of the community rest, the
economic depression, which a great war is bound to leave in its
wake, will revive the old evils in an aggravated and, it may be,
revolutionary form. Are we really prepared to reconstruct?