10 OCTOBER 1914, Page 12

[To THE EDITOR 07 THE " SPECTATOR."]

SIR,—What seems so strange to the ordinary outsider is that those "four just men"—Mr. Charles Trevelyan, with his morbid fear that the elements of national education will be infected by Mr. Asquith's bellicose fury ; Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, the leader with no followers ; Mr. Angell, with his childish and much-boomed illusions; and Mr. E. D. Morel —do not see that their conceit of self-righteousness consists in supposing that they have a monopoly of the idea that a great nation ought not to be unnecessarily degraded. When there is added to this reflection the fact that the enemy in question is not yet conquered, if, on the whole, not now likely to con- quer us, surely the superfluity of these academic wallowings in the obvious and the pseudo-sentimental must be apparent even to the most cultured and the most ignorant of faddists.

[We cannot publish any more letters on this subject.—En. Spectator.]