It will go hard with the government of England if it plays a grandiose
drama before hostile spectators who refuse to take part in it. It will
go hard with the nation, for it will be engulfed in anarchy.
At the present time, in this August of 1919, when I write these words,
five years after another August, this England of ours, this England
which I love because its history is in my soul and its blood is in my
body, and I have seen the glory of its spirit, is sick, nigh unto
death. Only great physicians may heal it, and its old vitality
struggling against disease, and its old sanity against insanity. Our
Empire is greater now in spaciousness than ever before, but our
strength to hold it has ebbed low because of much death, and a strain
too long endured, and strangling debts. The workman is tired and has
slackened in his work. In his scheme of life he desires more luxury
than our poverty affords. He wants higher wages, shorter hours, and
less output--reasonable desires in our state before the war,
unreasonable now because the cost of the war has put them beyond human
possibility.
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