That brings me to the first great gain of the War. We have found ourselves. Which of us, in the early months of 1914, would have dared to predict the splendours of the youth of this Empire--splendours which are now a part of our history? We are adepts at self-criticism and self-depreciation. We hate the language of emotion. Some of us, if we were taken to heaven and asked what we thought of it, would say that it is decent, or not so bad. I suppose we are jealous to keep our standard high, and to have something to say if a better place should be found. But in spite of all this, we do now know, and it is worth knowing, that we are not weaker than our fathers. We know that the people who inhabit these islands and this commonwealth of nations cannot be pushed on one side, or driven under, or denied a great share in the future ordering of the world. We know this, and our knowledge of it is the debt that we owe to our dead. It is not vanity to admit that we know it; on the contrary, it would be vanity to pretend that we do not know it. It is visible to other eyes than ours. Some time ago I heard an address given by a friend of mine, an Indian Mohammedan of warrior descent, to University students of his own faith. He was urging on them the futility of dreams and the necessity of self-discipline and self-devotion. 'Why do the people of this country', he said, 'count for so much all the world over? It is not because of their dreams; it is because thousands of them are lying at the bottom of the sea.'
Further, we have not only found ourselves; we have found one another. A new kindliness has grown up, during the War, between people divided by the barriers of class, or wealth, or circumstance. A statesman of the seventeenth century remarks that _It is a Misfortune for a Man not to have a Friend in the World, but for that reason he shall have no Enemy_. I might invert his maxim and say, _It is a Misfortune for a Man to have many Enemies, but for that reason he shall know who are his Friends_. No Radical member of Parliament will again, while any of us live, cast contempt on 'the carpet Captains of Mayfair'. No idle Tory talker will again dare to say that the working men of England care nothing for their country. Even the manners of railway travel have improved. I was travelling in a third-class compartment of a crowded train the other day; we were twenty in the compartment, but it seemed a pity to leave any one behind, and we made room for number twenty-one. Nothing but a very kindly human feeling could have packed us tight enough for this. Yet now is the time that has been chosen by some of these pensive gentlemen that I spoke of, and by some of these excitable journalists, to threaten us with class-war, and to try to make our flesh creep by conjuring up the horrors of revolution. I advise them to take their opinions to the third-class compartment and discuss them there. It is a good tribunal, for, sooner or later, you will find every one there--even officers, when they are travelling in mufti at their own expense. I have visited this tribunal very often, and I have always come away from it with the same impression, that this people means to win the War. But I do not travel much in the North of England, so I asked a friend of mine, whose dealings are with the industrial North, what the workpeople of Lancashire and Yorkshire think of the War. He said, 'Their view is very simple: they mean to win it; and they mean to make as much money out of it as ever they can.' Certainly, that is very simple; but before you judge them, put yourselves in their place. There are great outcries against profiteers, for making exorbitant profits out of the War, and against munition workers, for delaying work in order to get higher wages. I do not defend either of them; they are unimaginative and selfish, and I do not care how severely they are dealt with; but I do say that the majority of them are not wicked in intention. A good many of the more innocent profiteers are men whose sin is that they take an offer of two shillings rather than an offer of eighteenpence for what cost them one and a penny. Some of us, in our weaker moments, might be betrayed into doing the same. As for the munition workers, I remember what Goldsmith, who had known the bitterest poverty, wrote to his brother. 'Avarice', he said, 'in the lower orders of mankind is true ambition; avarice is the only ladder the poor can use to preferment. Preach then, my dear Sir, to your son, not the excellence of human nature nor the disrespect of riches, but endeavour to teach him thrift and economy. Let his poor wandering uncle's example be placed in his eyes. I had learned from books to love virtue before I was taught from experience the necessity of being selfish.'