Our enemy now proclaims that his objective is the crushing of Britain’s world-power in the interests of mankind.

Are we justified in retaining if we can what, in a by no means unstained past, we have acquired, or should we hand over our position, well and ill-gotten, to this new claimant, with his new culture, for the benefit of the world?

Man has a somewhat incurable belief that he can manage his own affairs, and we Britons hold the faith that our character, ideals, and experience fit us to control our own lives and property for the general good of mankind, side by side with other nations of like mind. The fortunate possessors of the greater Empire and the greater trade are not perhaps the most convincing advocates of the principle “Live and let live.” For all that, we find it impossible to admit the right of any nation to an aggressive policy toward us. Germany, after being petrified with surprise at our intervention, now accuses us of having planned the war and deliberately attacked her. It is divinely easy to claim things both ways when you are at war. We all see just now rather as in a glass darkly. And yet, with an immense Empire, an immense trade, and nothing that we wanted anywhere, with a crop of serious social and political troubles on hand, “a contemptible little army,” a tradition of abstention from European quarrels, a Free Trade policy, a democratic system of government, a Foreign Minister remarkable up to then for his services to peace, and a “degenerate, wealth-rotted, huckstering” population, it still seems to us (always excepting our handful of pre-war Jingoes) as improbable as it once seemed to Germany that we hatched and set on foot such a wildcat enterprise.