If Truth were to proclaim these facts duly pointed and applied, together with many another of like weight and significance from the house-tops, the Defence of the Realm Act would intervene promptly, strongly and passionately on behalf of Fiction; but the Act has limitations. The Still Small Voice evades the Act every time, it speaks less from the lips than to the hearts of men. There is no humbug so highly placed as to be able to shut it out, there is no man or woman so befogged or bewildered by the horror of the hour that he cannot hear the silences made audible. For Truth is not cast out of life, it is but despised and rejected by the world's rulers and even they cannot shut out the voice that whispers through all their waking hours, for while many men can deceive others, few, if any, are permitted entirely to deceive themselves in times like these. So many soft conventions have fallen by the way, so many of life's excuses and subterfuges have fallen into everlasting nothingness. Before the horror-stricken eyes of authority the world over, Truth, muzzled, bedraped, masked, and shrouded appears again like the skeleton at the feast, like the grinning skull that accompanied the Roman Emperors on their Triumphs to remind them that they too were mortal. Slowly yet with deliberation Truth is beginning to shed the coverings that officialdom had heaped in such designed profusion. The day is not far distant when the fetters will fall from the limbs, the shroud from the dread face, and in that hour not all the Acts and Proscriptions will avail to frame a covering. Europe, bleeding, sore, wounded, poverty-stricken, shattered beyond recognition, will see Truth face to face. And then----?
I have been trying to look through the clouds of war to what lies behind. Quite resolutely I have closed my ears to certain empty cries about the commercial conquest of Germany, about the coming of Protection, about all the panaceas of political and other quacks. Most of us who take the trouble to think can trace these cries to their source. I have endeavoured to look to the time when this old country of ours will be faced by a new set of conditions, by forces yet incalculable that war has brought into being. People have talked and written glibly about changes of heart, of the fraternising of capital and labour, of sin and crime and disease exorcised by some supreme spirit of good will, but I have my doubts. "Cœlum non animum mutant," wrote Horace, two thousand years ago.