Truly man is a political animal, and if you scratch
him you. will find that the party-man is somewhere underneath, even though in becoming so he may have, as the Greeks used to say, escaped his own notice. The very lawyer-like critics of the Govern- ment are speaking, moreover, from a brief which has never been placed in their hands. They profess to speak for the Navy and the Army. But if you asked the sailors what they wanted they would say, " Let us get on with our job in silence, and let the Government get on with theirs—which is winning the war." And the soldiers would say, "Give us more shells. We are 'agin' everything which pre- vents the Government from attending to that job." Sir John Jellicoe, if asked whether he wanted ballot-boxes on board ship, would probably talk about throwing them overboard, or using them as hen-coops, and Sir Douglas Haig would probably want to turn them into ammunition boxes. It is the professed despisers of politics who turn out, after all, to be nothing but politicians.
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