There remains, however, a realist group which admits these facts but which hopes to return to the "old Bri way" of waging war. Mr. Mackenzie King recently expressed his belief that not only would Canada never send an army overseas again but that Britain would not. Memories of a dreadful military effort have led many persons (for example, the most influential British military critic, Mr. Liddell Hart) to argue that Britain should decide for herself in the next war what share she will take. She not, it is argued, to be tied to French military methods, not to send millions of men to France; she is to go back to the good old days of limited-liability wars. This a subtler type of wishful thinking—but it is wishful thinking all the same.
But, as Mr, Baldwin has pointed out, Britain's frontier is now on the Rhine; and, as Lord Haig said in 1918, the British Army (just like those of the Continent) may find itself with its bark to the wall. This, too, the Government, it may be suspected, realizes, and this unpleasant truth the nation suspects. The days of limited-liability wars, like the days of British immunity from complete defeat, are over.
No one can doubt that the British people, the most patriotic in the world, will readjust itself to its sened position, But the readjust t will take time. And, while it ug on, politicians will play safe and show no morbid fear of backing down. It is not a dignified policy but it has much to recommend it, for a country whose rulers remember that the real lesson of the late war wi that internal unity of a nation was a surer guarantee of victory than a class military machine. That unity does not exist at the moment in ain and its creation is as anxious-aited by the British Government the completion of any number of ships
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.