From ‘The National Government‘, The Spectator, 29 May 1915:
We have got our backs to the wall. There is no alternative to the present Ministry. If they fail us, there is nothing left. This thought should not lead to dread or anxiety, but to the very opposite. They are Englishmen, and they are not going to fail us. They are going to succeed. Each man knows that he is taking not only his own political life in his hands, but the life of the country, and that if he allows personal feeling, personal ambition, indolence, want of nerve, or failure to take responsibility to ruin the cause, he will be thrice accursed, and that he can never be forgiven for his offence. The country is not, of course, going to be unjust to its servants, or to expect miracles from them. It only asks them to deserve success. Though intolerant of any selfishness or of any failure to spend themselves in the national cause, it will be absolutely just and tolerant as regards ill-fortune. All that it asks, but that it will insist on, is that every Minister shall do his best, and that he shall act with a full sense of responsibility and of the magnitude of his trust. The man who plays the part of the timid servant in the parable and lays up his talent in a napkin for fear he may be blamed is not the sort of man who is wanted in a National Government like the present. But, after all, there is little need to insist upon these points. We do not believe there is any member of the present Cabinet who has failed to realize the true nature of the task before him.
Cynics will tell us that what has always wrecked joint Cabinets, and will wreck the present Cabinet, is personal intrigue. “You think you have got rid of party,” they will say. “Possibly, but you will find that personal feeling engenders an even more malignant virus than that of party.” We do not believe it. We do not suppose that the war, or the need for patriotic effort, has suddenly turned all the men on the new Cabinet list from very human human beings into angels. We do believe, however, that the war has changed them from politicians into fighting men, and that till the war is over we can rely upon them to be inspired by a single purpose even though, of course, they will differ on a hundred points. To put it plainly, they know that there is nothing behind them, that the reserves have been brought up, and that they must either hold the trench or die in it. This thought will keep the Cabinet together till success crowns their effort.
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