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with which we have ever been confronted.” The necessity of facing that danger was one more blow to the Liberal creed. Traditional pacifist Liberalism was violated when Asquith and his fellow Imperialists in the Cabinet, who controlled foreign policy, agreed to give Sir John Fisher four new Dreadnoughts. Conservatives, dissatisfied, shouted the slogan, “We want eight and we won’t wait.” Haldane’s Territorial Army was equally resented by the pacifists of his party, who claimed that it would cost too much and drain money from social reform. With the King’s strong support it was enacted over their objections. “We are certainly living in hard times,” mourned King Edward, “but yet I hope that peace may be maintained—but only because Europe is afraid to go to war.”

The topic of invasion occupied both the official and the public mind. The Committee of Imperial Defence appointed an Invasion Inquiry in 1908 and summoned the ex-Prime Minister to give his views on the evidence it had collected. Balfour spoke for an hour in a closely reasoned and “luminous” exposition, “quite perfect in form and language,” which according to Esher, a member of the committee, so “dumbfounded” Asquith, Grey, Haldane and Lloyd George that none of them could think of a single question to ask him. “The general opinion was that no finer exposition of this question has ever been made.”

The Committee’s conclusion that a successful invasion could not be mounted was not known to the public, which felt an awful fascination in the topic. Erskine Childers had raised it in an absorbing novel The Riddle of the Sands, in 1903 and William Le Queux more emphatically if less artistically in a novel called The Invasion of 1910 which ran as a serial in the Daily Mail in 1906 and was advertised through London by sandwich-men dressed in Prussian blue uniforms and spiked helmets. In 1909 Guy du Maurier’s play An Englishman’s Home, which dramatized an invasion by the forces of “the Emperor of the North,” opened at Wyndham’s Theatre and played to packed houses for eighteen months. The idea of invasion became almost a psychosis. Living at Rye on England’s south coast Henry James felt “exposed,” as he nervously wrote a friend in 1909. He worried that “when [he did not say ’if] the German Emperor carries the next war into this country, my chimney pots, visible to a certain distance out at sea, may be his very first objective.”

The prospect of war negated everything that orthodox Liberalism stood for, yet the Government had to adapt to it. Meanwhile the sex war raged at home. The Suffragette movement, which Charles Masterman believed to be an “outlet for suppressed energy,” released a curious surge of sex hatred, a mutual “blaze of antagonism,” as H. G. Wells called it, which fitted the other strangely violent quarrels afflicting England in the first decade of the Twentieth Century. Wells thought the main impulse of the Suffragettes—that swarm of “wildly exasperated human beings”—was “vindictive,” an outburst against man’s long arrogant assumption of superiority. Their open warfare followed almost immediately upon the advent of the Liberals, prompted by repeated postponements and refusal of the Government to introduce a bill of enfranchisement. Unable to obtain any satisfaction by legal means, the women resorted to tactics which were essentially “propaganda of the deed” and, like their prototype, anarchic in spirit. They turned up at every political meeting despite all doorkeepers’ precautions and drowned out the speakers by ringing bells and shrieking for the vote. They besieged the Houses of Parliament and offices of Whitehall, attacked ministers on their doorsteps, in one case knocking down Mr. Birrell, the Minister of Education, and kicking him in the shins, broke department-store windows with hammers, set fires in mail boxes, penetrated the House and stopped proceedings by chaining themselves to the grill of the Ladies Gallery and keeping up the incessant shout, “Votes for Women!”

In 1909 under the Liberal Government occurred the first forcible feeding of imprisoned Suffragettes,