It is essential that
they should not be mere opium visions that begin and end in smoke--and so
often in cannon smoke. I make no apology, therefore, for returning to the
purely practical and realistic point I urged last week: the fact that we
shall lose everything we might have gained if we lose the idea that the
responsible person is responsible.
For instance, it is almost specially so with the one or two things in
which the British Government, or the British public, really are behaving
badly. The first, and worst of them, is the non-extension of the
Moratorium, or truce of debtor and creditor, to the very world where there
are the poorest debtors and thc cruellest creditors. This is infamous:
and should be, if possible, more infamous to those who think the war right
than to those who think it wrong. Everyone knows that the people who can
least pay their debts are the people who are always trying to. Among the
poor a payment may be as rash as a speculation. Among the rich a
bankruptcy may be as safe as a bank. Considering the class from which
private soldiers are taken, there is an atrocious meanness in the idea of
buying their blood abroad, while we sell their sticks at home. The
English language, by the way, is full of delicate paradoxes. We talk of
the private soldiers because they are really public soldiers; and we talk
of the public schools because they are really private schools.
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