The Spectator

From ‘The “Willing” Badge’, The Spectator, 6 March 1915: A final ground for giving badges to those who have offered themselves and been rejected must be mentioned. Under any scheme for the presentation of badges a register should be kept giving in general terms the ground on which each man was rejected — namely, medical reasons, such as heart weakness, and so on; physical defects, as, for example, some small deformity or some defect of vision; or, again, some such ground as inability to reach the standard of height or the standard of chest measurement. In the last two cases it may well be that the government will come to see that after all small men can fight and march quite as well as big men, and endure hardship even better.

From ‘A Plea for Posterity’, The Spectator, 6 March 1915: A good many people have latterly argued that as posterity will enjoy the advantages of a successful war, so posterity may honourably be left to pay for those advantages in the shape of yearly interest upon a swollen National Debt. This is always the argument of the man who wishes his obligations to be met by other people. If our ancestors had acted upon this principle, the country would never have been free from a crushing burden of Debt, ever increasing with each new war. In the Napoleonic Wars, lasting for over twenty years, burdens of which the present generation has no conception were imposed upon the taxpayer to meet a very large part of the daily cost of the war.

From ‘The New Naval Measures and the United States’, The Spectator, 6 March 1915: Britain proposes to stop all German imports and exports by the general pressure of her naval strength, whereas the United States says that we ought to use this pressure only in accordance with what have hitherto been regarded as the laws of blockade. The United States says, in effect: “Proclaim a blockade such as we have experienced of read of in past wars – a proper blockade with legal sanction and everything handsome about it – and we shall have no right to complain, even though none of our trade can pierce the line. What we cannot tolerate is that you should net upon a general principle, and that we should never know how and where the stroke will fall upon our trade.

From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 6 March 1915: THE advance made during the week by our naval force in the Dardanelles has been most satisfactory. As we write our ships are engaged with the great group of forts at the Narrows, while in the Gulf of Saros, opposite the neck of the Gallipoli Peninsula, French and British ships have doubled the bombardment and have been able to take some of the enemy's works in reverse. By the time these pages are in our readers' hands it is most probable that the action in the Narrows, where the Straits are only about half a mile broad, will have been decided. Nothing above ground, whether of earth or stone, is able to stand the fire of the Allies' squadron, which numbers in all some fifty-two vessels.

From ‘On Commas’, The Spectator, 27 February 1915: I CAN picture the development of the misled reformer who introduced the comma into the languages of men. His laborious finger lost itself time after time among the elaborate pothooks of his generation; time after time he declared in a hissing voice that script was a fiend and time after time he led back his wandered finger to the beginning of the long crude sentence and renewed the slow chant that divinely revealed the thoughts of his distant friend. He had little access to print and was bothered with the bad writing of his many correspondents, but whether he was Jew or German or French or a rather unlikely Englishman this witness sayeth not.

From ‘Pages of War’, The Spectator, 27 February 1915: With its darkened lights and sparse traffic, its khaki-dotted clubs and restaurants working at half-pressure, its transformed shop-windows, where everything is "for the front," London was yet never so absolutely, so intimately itself. All the distilled essence of the Empire is concentrated here under these foggy skies swept by wheeling searchlights. As though in the full pageant of mid-season, the cream of the shires and bigwigs from the unfamiliar counties pass and repass along pavements where no alien jostles them off the kerb, magnetized every one of them from their homes by haunting, mute anxiety to keep their finger on the pulse of the world's supreme news-centre.

From a letter to the Editor, ‘The Channel Tunnel’, The Spectator, 27 February 1915: [To the Editor of The “Spectator’] SIR,—Many of us must be wondering what the promoters of the Channel Tunnel enterprise think about the matter now. To those of us who are of the "Island" school it has always appeared that there were three main objections to the scheme —first, the risk of panic and of the evils that arise from panic; secondly, the real danger involved; and thirdly, the fact that in creating a tunnel we should be giving a hostage to fortune. A mere layman cannot set forth adequately the risks that the existence of a tunnel might have involved in the present war; but his guesses may not be altogether devoid of suggestiveness.