Epilogue
At home, though the rays of "sweet unrationed revelry" were still to come, and Dulce Domum could not yet be sung in every sense, February brought us some relief in the demobilisation of the pivotal pig. And the decision to hold a National Industrial Conference was of encouraging augury for the settlement of industrial strife on the basis of a full inquiry and frank statement of facts. In other walks of life reticence still has its charms, and even in February people had begun to ask who the General was who had threatened not to write a book about the War.
March, the mad month, remained true to type. Even Mr. Punch found it hard to preserve his equanimity:
O Month, before your final moon is set
Much may have happened—anything, in fact;
More than in any March that I have met
(Last year excepted) fearful nerves are racked;
Anarchy does with Russia what it likes;
Paris is put conundrums very knotty;
And here in England, with its talk of strikes,
Men, like your own March hares, seem going dotty.
Abroad the ex-Kaiser was very busy sawing trees, possibly owing to an hallucination that they were German Generals.
At home the Government decided to release such of the Sinn Fein prisoners as had not already saved them the trouble, and a Coal Industry Commission was appointed on which no representative of the general public was invited to sit—that is to say, the patient, much enduring consumer, not the public which has all along sought to discount peace by premature whooping, jubilating, and Jazzing. For the Dove of Peace, though in strict training, seemed in danger of collapsing under the weight of the League of Nations' olive bough, to say nothing of other perils, notably the Bolshy-bird, a most obscene brand of vulture.
Mr. Wilson was once more on the Atlantic, and Mr. Lloyd George, distracted between his duties in Paris and the demands of Labour, recalled Sir Boyle Roche's bird, or the circus performer riding two horses at once. In Parliament the interpretation of election pledges occupied a good deal of time, and Mr. Bonar Law twice declared the policy of the Government in
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