Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches

My "Little Bit"

The articles in this book, with the exception of the first two, were all written during the war at the request of the various editors by whose courtesy they are now reproduced in volume form. Most of them, notably those which appeared in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, were, by my ow...

Chapters

14. Part 14

At the present time more than at any other period of history we of the British Empire should bless God for our enemies! What they have done and what they are doing for us, albei...

13. Part 13

“Shall we meet again?” sighs the bereaved mother, the lonely wife, the despairing lover! Most assuredly you will!--by all the known laws of attraction in this glorious Universe...

10. Part 10

We shall do well to think of, and to long remember, some of this “hardest fighting.” For example, when they made their wonderful stand against the Prussian Guards, with the Wilt...

11. Part 11

Only there is no poet among us worthy of the name to “sing the memory” of Jack Cornwell, thanks to the swarm of atheists, pessimists, decadents, and anti-idealists who have been...

7. Part 7

Here we touch the vital centre of the whole. On no subject does man ever show himself so violently crazed as on religion. The gods of the past, created by his fanatical imaginat...

15. Part 15

You, whose eyes are able to read these tragic lines of blind John Milton, can you realise what they mean? Do you feel to the innermost core of your heart the blackness of that “...

5. Part 5

Women! You are wanted by the Nation! In the words of the recruiting posters “Your Country calls!” It calls even YOU--you, who for centuries have been the “weak vessels” of man’s...

12. Part 12

The service of Christ should be broad and all-embracing, generous, cheerful, ungrudging, and untiring in the aid of all humanity, rich and poor, old and young, sinful and sorry,...

18. Part 18

So it was settled. I and my friend (a lady who has been my companion throughout my life since my childhood, and who has generously and kindly undertaken all my household cares)...

19. Part 19

PORTIA: Very vilely in the morning when he is sober, and most vilely in the afternoon when he is drunk; when he is best, he is a little worse than a man; and when he is worst, h...

2. Part 2

Unhappily, and in flat contradiction to that “humane” spirit, which we so frequently profess, treachery strikes the dominant note in modern warfare, and this is one of the chief...

3. Part 3

Hence the Great Unrest. People scurry to and fro all over the earth, like ants disturbed on their hill by a burning match thrown in among them. They do not know what is the matt...

1. Part 1

The articles in this book, with the exception of the first two, were all written during the war at the request of the various editors by whose courtesy they are now reproduced i...

9. Part 9

Nothing is lovelier than the sight of a perfectly happy child--a little, laughing, dancing, restless, sparkling bit of humanity just beginning to expand into life like a plant p...

16. Part 16

It is time this matter was handled boldly, with “gloves off,” as Queen Elizabeth would have handled it. She would have sent all Germans out of the country at the very declaratio...

4. Part 4

And let us not forget that we were, or appeared to be, supinely indifferent to her inroads on all that we used to claim as our “special line” and particular property. We were, l...

6. Part 6

Reading this and various other letters of similar tone from men in the very thick of battle, all bearing ample testimony to the same truth, I cannot believe that the foe is so u...

17. Part 17

Complaints are rife and bitter concerning the tough, indigestible, and injurious mixture permitted to the taxpaying public as “war bread.” General condemnation of Government flo...

8. Part 8

He knows Viscount Grey personally, so he says, but--“he never would take my advice”--and as for Kitchener--ah!--“That’s a man who had immense possibilities!--immense!--but he wa...

20. Part 20

There is a moral in this story (despite the contempt it must evoke among future female M.P.s), and “the pint,” as Captain Cuttle or his friend Jack Bunsby remarked, “lies in the...