But Peace will also bring to us in this country the menace from within which was with us before the war began, as it is with every nation at whatever time of life—the menace of its individual failings, of its rankness and its uncompleted justice, its riot after riches at the expense of national health, its exaggerated party strife, its penny wisdom and pound folly, its lack of an ideal, and perpetual drifting it knows not whither. If when the war ends we remain a nation, masters of our own lives—and there is no Briton who is not convinced that we shall—the menace from within must again be faced; faced with a stouter heart and a quicker brain; faced at last with some sort of corporate will to that victory over ourselves, so much more difficult to win than over hostile fleets and fortresses. To win the war, and thereafter lose to our own weakness, would cap the event with irony indeed!
It is the fashion with some to talk glibly of this war as if it were a purge that will drain from our State innumerable ills. The war’s honourable necessity none of us dispute, but for us it has in truth only the one advantage—of having revealed to ourselves our quality, re-established our faith. That quality, that faith, to be of any lasting use, will have to stand not only the dreadful spasm of war, but the long exhaustion, the manifold increase of economic stress and social trouble that will infallibly begin when the war ends. Unless we are resolved to carry on our effort of sacrifice, good-will, and courage long into the future, the last state of this land will be worse than the first. The purge that we like to speak of will be proven nothing but a debauch, paid for, like all debauches, by lassitude and spleen.
All national energy at the moment is inevitably bent to the ending of a state of things dreadful to every man and woman living; but, while doing this with all our might, we need to keep alive in our minds the feeling that the fight is not for mere gratification of the passion to down our foes, not just a spurt of military heroism, to be drowned in the drink and applause of victory; but a fight for something abiding in ourselves and in the world—for spiritual, not material, ends.