But we sincerely hope that the Government will not act
upon the advice that they should adopt a programme which would assuredly revive Party strife in a bad form. Unity is wanted, not dissension ; concentration on the conduct of the war, not a dispersal of energy and mental attention over a variety of indifferent subjects. The Government must certainly lay their plans, and that most carefully, but not in the direction in which many of their friends are urging them. The Government could best secure unity, the one essential thing, by simply demanding a mandate from the people to continue the war with the single object of victory. They would ask, in fact, for a vote of confidence. That would cause no superfluous division of Parties, and those who did not wish for victory—namely, the Pacificists and Defeatists—would probably lose their seats, to the delight of the majority of the nation.
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