AFTER THE WAR.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18267, 29 December 1924, Page 14

AFTER THE WAR.

HISTORICAL PARALLEL, j WHO SHALL REAP THE BENEFIT ? (TBOH OCT* OWS COBBBSPOHDMT.) LONDON, November 13. The Hon. John W. Forteseue, who was private secretary to the Governor, Sir William Jervois, in New Zealand, and now is librarian at Windsor Castle, and editor of the Official History of the- War, contributes an article to the /'Morning Post," in which he shows that recovery from a disastrous war is not accomplished in one generation. To what end was the sacrifice of all that we held dearest between 1914 and 1918, many are asking. "In the awful, dreary years that followed each other in grim succession after Waterloo," says Mr Forteseue, "our forefathers asked themselves precisely the same question. Times were, on the whole, worse than they arc now. Taxation was crushing; trade was wretched; agriculture was depressed to the lowest depths; unemployment and the consequent misery were appalJing; ' and, even as,now, the revolutionary j spirit was. abroad. Let it not be said that the war which ended at Waterloo I bears no comparison with the German I war. It took longer to accomplish, relatively speaking, the same measure of destruction, but it lasted for twentythree years; and at its close in 1815, even as now in 1918, there was an entirely new England to be taken in i hand, remoulded, and brought into order. "It was a big job. Far greater knowledge than the average man possesses or can be expected to possess i s needed to appreciate how our forefathers gradually transformed the whole system of administration in every province of government and honestly sought to remedy every eviL They were hampered by outbreak after outbreak of the revolutionary spirit on the Continent, with strong echoes at home, in 1820, 1830 and. 1848, but they stuck to their task. They made mistakes, of. course. They thought that lowering of .the franchise would quench the revolutionary spirit, but it did not an d it has aot, They felt sure, some

of thorn, that Free Trade would bring universal peace, but it did not and it will not. But earnestly they sought peace and ensured it, sometimes by the right methods, but too often by putting asido all thought of war by neglect of both Army and Navy. "Never was the British soldier more scurvily treated than in the tweutyfive years immediately after 1815; and tho British sailor- fared little better. The haste to disband soldiers after the war was almost indecent, and certainly extravagant. Thousands of them put themselves on board ship and sailed to South America to fight battles, in which they had no interest, in that quarter. Those that remained with tho colours were mostly distributed all over the newly-won Empire in bad quarters and generally in unhealthy climates. Something was done for every other class, but little for them. But tho Navy remembered its Nelson, and the Army its Wellington, and very quietly and unobtrusively did the very big work of consolidating India and the Empire at large. v Bevivai in 1850. "General prosperity began to revive about 1850, and the first fruits of the great war were reaped chiefly by those who had known none of its perils or anxieties. The second fruits fell to a later generation, when.about the year 1880 Britons suddenly awoke to pride in the Empire. The final fruits were garnered between 1914 and 1918. We were unprepared for war, in a military sense, in 1914. We always are and always haye been. But, to the honour of a century of British statesmen, we were beyond comparison more lawabiding, better disciplined, better united in 1914 than in 1793. And remembering the long and bitter struggle against Prance, we set our teeth aud resolved, in the slang phrase, 'to see the j thing through.' Our little army, in my j belief tho very finest force of its size I that ever took the field, did inestimable i service during the four months before it was annihilated, by erecting a i standard of devotion and self-sacrifice for those that were to fill their places. They were true to the old traditions of Abercromby, Moore and Wellington, as - W as the Navy to the traditions of St i Vincent, Duncan, Dundonald, and Nel- ; bou. The spirit of the two Services ■ heightened that of the nation. The " Empire rallied to us, in emulation of : the 'Old Contemptibles'; and even the , descendants of the Boldiers who hod : emigrated to South America came over , i n their thousands though unable to

' speak a word of English, *° the old country of their "Paradoxical as it may sound, is much in common between a B? eaI SnB and a great religious revival., *nH appeal chiefly to tho emotions^ rouso pasßions strangely mln good and evil; but both nrca , all the doctrine of chcerfnl and self-abnegation. Both breed scoffers; and of both the c ~ eet great measure transitory. Bat not so altogether. Some seed, a has fallen upon good ground, an# more, though it germinate not preserves its vitality dormant be awakened to fruitfulncss. ™BMH lies the hope, not of tho new and new earth promised by c t na but of a new, greater, and/.f9H England, such as our fathers for us after Waterloo, by hard tbo^BH