Either we must make up our minds that we will not take part in a European war under any circumstances, or we must have national service; but we canno… - F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead

Free trade had once and for all broken down. Even when combined with depredation it did not pay; it could not find them the money to pay this year's national bills. The Conservative party had one alternative to a Budget which destroyed capital—the alternative of men who had watched the history of tariffs in Europe and America for 30 years, and learnt the great lesson upon which Bismarck taught his fellow-countrymen.

Disraeli, in his youth, laid down the principles on which the England of his time ought to have been based, and his comparative failure to convince his contemporaries or to overbear his philosophic opponents left his country the richer by a supreme instance of political genius and the poorer by its slums, its wasted physique, and its industrial unrest and class hatred. If a Providence could have made Disraeli a dictator in the early 'thirties, there would have been no social problem to-day. That great man desired to build up the new industrial State on the principles and practice which had animated the older rural and urban dispensations—on the community of interest between master and man, between capitalist and employee, between guild and guild, between agricultural labourer and town workman. What was best in the feudal conception of the past was to be applied to the new progressive forces of the nineteenth century, and the aristocracy of industry was to follow in the tradition of the aristocracy of feudalism and make itself the guardian, and not the exploiter, of its new retainers.

I have always placed my highest and most permanent hopes upon the eternity of the Communal situation. The greater the political progress made by the Hindus, the greater, in my judgment, will the Moslem distrust and discontent become. All the conferences in all the world cannot bridge over the unbridgeable, and between these two communities lies a chasm which cannot be crossed by the resources of modern political engineering.