Other institutions, too, had been weighed in the balance. The War Office was only the commonest of many bywords. The Houses of Parliament, in which too many men of military age had demanded the forced enlistment of others, wore an air of insincerity, apart from the loss of prestige inevitable in a war; for armies always take the colour out of deliberative assemblies. To moderate this effect a large number of members who did not go to the war found means to wear khaki in London instead of black, but this well-conceived precaution only succeeded in further curling the lip of derision among actual soldiers. The churches, as we have seen, got their chance, made little or nothing of it, and came out of the war quite good secular friends with the men, but almost null and void in their eyes as ghostly counsellors, and stripped of the vague consequence with which many men had hitherto credited them on account of any divine mission they might be found to have upon closer acquaintance. Respect for the truthfulness of the Press was clean gone. The contrast between the daily events that men saw and the daily accounts that were printed was final. What the Press said thenceforth was not evidence. But still it had sent out plum puddings at Christmas.
Neither was anything evidence now that was said by a politician. A great many plain men had really drawn a distinction, all their lives, between the solemn public assurances of statesmen and the solemn public assurances of men who draw teeth outside dock-gates and take off their caps and call upon God to blast the health of their own darling children if a certain pill they have for sale does not cure colds, measles, ringworm, and the gripes within twenty-four hours of taking. A Swift might say there never was any difference, but the plain man had always firmly believed that there was. Now, after the war, he is shaken. Every disease which victory was to cure he sees raging worse than before: more poverty, less liberty, more likelihood of other wars, more spite between master and man, less national comradeship. And then the crucial test case, the solemn vow of the statesmen, all with their hands on their sleek bosoms, that if only the common man would save them just that once they would turn to and think of nothing else, do nothing else, but build him a house, assure him of work, settle him on land, make all England a paradise for him—a “land fit for heroes to live in.” And then the sequel: the cold fit; the feint at house-building and its abandonment; all the bankruptcy of promise; the ultimate bilking, done by way of reluctant surrender to “anti-waste” stunts got up by the same cheap-jacks of the Press who in the first year of the war would have had the statesmen promise yet more wildly than they did. Colds, measles, ringworm, and gripes all flourishing, much more than twenty-four hours after, and new ailments added unto them.
No relief, either, by running from one medicine-man to the next. Few of our disenchanted men doubt that the lightning cure of the Communist is only just another version of the lightning cure of the Tory, the authoritarian, the peremptory regimentalist. “Give me a free hand and all will be well with you.” Both say exactly the same thing in the end. One of them may call it the rule of the fittest, the other the rule of the proletariat; each means exactly the same thing—the rule of himself, the enforcement on everyone else of his own darling theory of what is best for them, whether they know it or not. Small choice in rotten apples; one bellyful of east wind is a diet as poor as another. Not in the yells and counter-yells of this and that vendor of patent hot-air is the heart of the average ex-soldier engaged. Rather “Away with all gas-projectors alike” is his present feeling towards eloquent men, Left or Right. For the moment he knows them too well, and is tired of hearing
