Chapter IX: Front Matter (9)

With regard to the matter of treaty obligations generally, the German Chancellor excuses the breach of Belgian neutrality by military necessity--at the same time making a virtue of having respected the neutrality of Holland and Switzerland, and saying that it does not enter his head to touch the neutrality of the Scandinavian countries. A virtue which admittedly is only practiced in the absence of temptation from self-interest and military advantage does not seem greatly worth vaunting. To the Chancellor's concluding statement that "to the German sword" is intrusted "the care of freedom for European peoples and States," the treatment of Belgium is a sufficient answer.

* * * * *

MR. ASQUITH AT EDINBURGH.

Speech in Usher Hall, Sept. 18.

A fortnight ago today, in the Guildhall of the City of London, I endeavored to present to the nation and to the world the reasons which have compelled us, the people of all others which have the greatest interest in the maintenance of peace, to engage in the hazards and horrors of war. I do not wish to repeat tonight in any detail what I then said.

The war has arisen immediately and ostensibly, as every one knows, out of a dispute between Austria and Servia, in which we in this country had no direct concern. The diplomatic history of those critical weeks--the last fortnight in July and the first few days of August--is now accessible to all the world. It has been supplemented during the last few days by the admirable and exhaustive dispatch of our late Ambassador at Vienna, Sir Maurice de Bunsen, a dispatch which I trust everybody will read, and no one who reads it can doubt that, largely through the efforts of my right honorable friend and colleague Sir Edward Grey [loud cheers] the conditions of a peaceful settlement of the actual controversy were already within sight when, on July 31, Germany [hisses] by her own deliberate act made war a certainty.

The facts are incontrovertible. They are not sought to be controverted, except, indeed, by the invention and circulation of such wanton falsehoods as that France was contemplating, and even commencing, the violation of Belgian territory as a first step on her road to Germany. The result is that we are at war, and, as I have already shown elsewhere, and as I repeat here tonight, we are at war for three reasons--in the first place, to vindicate the sanctity of treaty obligations ["Hear, hear!"] and of what is properly called the public law of Europe, ["Hear, hear!";] in the second place, to assert and to enforce the independence of free States, relatively small and weak, against the encroachments and the violence of the strong, [cheers,] and, in the third place, to withstand, as we believe in the best interests not only of our own empire but of civilization at large, the arrogant claim of a single power to dominate the development of the destinies of Europe. [Cheers.]

Meeting a Challenge.

Since I last spoke some faint attempts have been made in Germany to dispute the accuracy and the sincerity of this statement of our attitude and aim. It has been suggested, for instance, that our professed zeal for treaty rights and for the interests of small States is a newborn and simulated passion. What, we are asked, has Great Britain cared in the past for treaties or for the smaller nationalities except when she had some ulterior and selfish purpose of her own to serve? I am quite ready to meet that challenge, and to meet it in the only way in which it could be met, by reference to history. And out of many illustrations which I might take I will content myself here tonight with two, widely removed in point of time, but both, as it happens, very apposite to the present case.

I will go back first to the war carried on first against the revolutionary Government of France and then against Napoleon, which broke out in 1793, and which lasted for more than twenty years. We had then at the head of the Government in this country one of the most peace-loving Ministers who have ever presided over our fortunes--Mr. Pitt. For three years, from 1789 to 1792, he resolutely refused to interfere in any way with the revolutionary proceedings in France or in the wars that sprang out of them, and as lately, I think, as February in 1792, in a memorable speech in the House of Commons, which shows among other things the shortness of human foresight, he declared that there never was a time when we in this country could more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace.

And what was it, gentlemen, that, within a few months of that declaration, led this pacific Minister to war? It was the invasion of the treaty rights guaranteed by ourselves of a small European State, the then States General of Holland. [Cheers.] For nearly 200 years the great powers of Europe had guaranteed to Holland the exclusive navigation of the River Scheldt. The French revolutionary Government invaded what is now Belgium, and as a first act of hostility to Holland declared the navigation of the Scheldt to be open. Our interest in that matter then, as now, was relatively small and insignificant, but what was Mr. Pitt's reply?

Defense of Small States.

I quote you the exact words he used in the House of Commons, they are so applicable to the circumstances of the present moment. This is in 1793:

England will never consent that another country should arrogate the
power of annulling, at her pleasure, the political system of
Europe, established by solemn treaties and guaranteed by the
consent of the powers. [Cheers.]

He went on to say:

This House [the House of Commons] means substantial good faith to
its engagements. If it retains a just sense of the solemn faith of
treaties, it must show a determination to support them.

And it was in consequence of that stubborn and unyielding determination to maintain treaties to defend small States, to resist the aggressive domination of a single power, that we were involved in a war which we had done everything to avoid, and which was carried on upon a scale, both as to area and as to duration, up to then unexampled in the history of mankind. That is one precedent. Let me give you one more.

I come down to 1870, when this very treaty to which we are parties, no less than Germany, and which guarantees the integrity and independence of Belgium, was threatened. Mr. Gladstone was then Prime Minister of this country, [cheers,] and he was, if possible, a stronger and more ardent advocate of peace even than Mr. Pitt himself. ["Hear, hear!"]

Mr. Gladstone's Dictum.

Mr. Gladstone, pacific as he was, felt so strongly the sanctity of our obligations that--though here again we had no direct interest of any kind at stake--he made agreements with France and Prussia to co-operate with either of the belligerents if the other violated Belgian territory, and I should like to read a passage from a speech ten years later, delivered in 1880, by Mr. Gladstone himself in this city, in which he reviewed that transaction and explained his reasons for it. He said: "If we had gone to war"--which he was prepared to do--"we should have gone to war for freedom; we should have gone to war for public right; we should have gone to war to save human happiness from being invaded by tyrannous and lawless power." That is what I call a good cause, though I detest war, and there are no epithets too strong if you will supply me with them that I will not endeavor to heap upon its head.

So much for our own action in the past in regard to treaties and small States. But faint as is this denial of this part of our case, it becomes fainter still, it dissolves into the thinnest of thin air, when it has to deal with our contention that we and our allies are withstanding a power whose aim is nothing less than the domination of Europe. ["Hear, hear!"]

It is, indeed, the avowed belief of the leaders of German thought--I will not say of the German people--of those who for many years past have controlled German policy, that such a domination, carrying with it the supremacy of what they call German culture [laughter] and the German spirit is the best thing that could happen to the world.

German "Culture."

Let me then ask for a moment what is this German culture, what is this German spirit of which the Emperor's armies are at present the missionaries in Belgium and in France? [Laughter.] Mankind owes much to Germany, a very great debt for the contributions she has made to philosophy, to science and to the arts; but that which is specifically German in the movement of the world in the last thirty years has been, on the intellectual side, the development of the doctrine of the supreme and ultimate prerogative in human affairs of material forces, and, on the practical side, taking of the foremost place in the fabrication and the multiplication of the machinery of destruction.

To the men who have adopted this gospel, who believe that power is the be all and end all of the State, naturally a treaty is nothing more than a piece of parchment, and all the Old World talk about the rights of the weak and the obligations of the strong is only so much threadbare and nauseating cant, for one very remarkable feature of this new school of doctrine is, whatever be its intellectual or its ethical merits, that it has turned out as an actual code for life to be a very purblind philosophy.

The German culture, the German spirit, did not save the Emperor and his people from delusions and miscalculations as dangerous as they were absurd in regard to the British Empire.

A Fantastic Dream.

We were believed by these cultivated observers [laughter] to be the decadent descendants of a people who, by a combination of luck and of fraud, [laughter,] had managed to obtain dominion over a vast quantity of the surface and the populations of the globe.

This fortuitous aggregation [laughter and cheers] which goes by the name of the British Empire was supposed to be so insecurely founded, and so loosely knit together, that at the first touch of serious menace from without it would fall to pieces and tumble to the ground. [Cheers.]

Our great dominions were getting heartily tired of the imperial connection. India, [loud cheers,] it was notorious to every German traveler, [laughter,] was on the verge of open revolt, and here at home we, the people of this United Kingdom, were riven by dissension so deep and so fierce that our energies, whether for resistance or for attack, would be completely paralyzed.

What a fantastic dream, ["Hear, hear!"] and what a rude awakening! [Laughter and cheers.] And in this vast and grotesque and yet tragic miscalculation is to be found one of the roots, perhaps the main root, of the present war.

But let us go one step more. It has been said, "By their fruits ye shall know them," and history will record that when the die was cast and the struggle began, it was the disciples of that same creed who revived methods of warfare which have for centuries past been condemned by the common sense as well as by the humanity of the great mass of the civilized world. [Cheers.]

Branded on the Brow.

Louvain, Malines, Termonde--these are names which will henceforward be branded on the brow of German culture. The ruthless sacking of the ancient and famous towns of Belgium is fitly supplemented by the story that reaches us only today from our own headquarters in France of the proclamation issued less than a week ago by the German authorities, who were for a moment, and happily for little more than a moment, in occupation of the venerable city of Rheims.

Mr. Asquith then read the concluding paragraph of the proclamation which appeared in these columns yesterday.

Do not let it be forgotten that it is from a power whose intellectual leaders are imbued with the idea that I have described, and whose Generals in the field sanction and even direct those practices--it is from that power the claim proceeds to impose its culture, its spirit, which means its domination, upon the rest of Europe. That is a claim, I say to you, to all my fellow-countrymen, to every citizen and subject of the British Empire whose ears and eyes my words can reach--that is a claim that everything that is great in our past and everything that promises hope or progress in our future summons us to resist to the end. [Loud cheers.]

The task--do not let us deceive ourselves--will not be a light one. Its full accomplishment--and nothing short of full accomplishment [cheers]--is worthy of our traditions or will satisfy our resolve--will certainly take months. It may even take years.

I have come here tonight not to ask you to count the cost, for no price can be too high to pay when honor and freedom are at stake, but to put before you, as I have tried to do, the magnitude of the issue and the supreme necessity that lies upon us as a nation, nay as a brotherhood and family of nations, to rise to its height and acquit ourselves of our duty.

Our Favorable Position.

The war has now lasted more than six weeks. Our supremacy at sea [great cheers] has not been seriously questioned. [Laughter.] Full supplies of food and of raw materials are making their way to our shores from every quarter of the globe. [Cheers.] Our industries, with one or two exceptions, maintain their activities.

Unemployment is so far not seriously in excess of the average. The monetary situation has improved, and every effort that the zeal and the skill of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, [cheers,] with the co-operation and expert advice of the bankers and business men of the country, can devise--every effort is being made to achieve what is most essential, the complete re-establishment of the foreign exchanges.

Meanwhile, the merchant shipping of the enemy has been hunted from the seas [cheers] and our seaman are still patiently, or impatiently, [laughter,] waiting for a chance to try conclusions with the opposing fleet. Great and incalculable is the debt which we have owed during these weeks, and which in increasing measure we shall continue to owe, to our navy. [Cheers.] The navy needs no help, and as the months roll on--thanks to a far-sighted policy in the past--its proportionate strength will grow. [Cheers.]

Army's Glorious Record.

If we turn to our army [cheers] we can say with equal justice and pride that during these weeks it has rivaled the most glorious records of its past. [Cheers.] Sir John French [cheers] and his gallant officers and men live in our hearts, as they will live in the memories of those who come afterward. [Cheers,]

But splendid achievements such as these--equally splendid in retirement and in advance ["Hear, hear!"]--cannot be won without a heavy expenditure of life and limb, of equipment and supplies. Even now, at this very early stage, I suppose there is hardly a person here who is not suffering from anxiety and suspense. Some of us are plunged in sorrow for the loss of those we love; cut off, some of them, in the springtime of their young lives. We will not mourn for them overmuch. One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name. [Cheers.]

These gaps have to be filled. The wastage of modern war is relentless and almost inconceivable. We have--I mean his Majesty's Government have--since the war began dispatched to the front already considerably over 200,000 men [cheers] and the amplest provision has been made for keeping them supplied with all that was necessary in food, in stores, and in equipment. They will very soon be reinforced by regular troops from India, from Egypt, and the Mediterranean, and in due time by the contingents which our dominions are furnishing with such magnificent patriotism and liberality. [Cheers.]

Eager Territorials.

We have with us here our own gallant territorials, becoming every day a fitter and a finer force, eager and anxious to respond to any call either at home or abroad that may be made upon them. [Cheers.] But that is not enough. We must do still more. Already, in little more than a month, we have 500,000 recruits for the four new armies which, as Lord Kitchener told the country yesterday, he means to have ready to bring into the field. In a single day we have had as many men enlist as we have been accustomed to enlist in the course of a whole year. It is not, I think, surprising that the machinery has been overstrained, and there have been many cases of temporary inconvenience and hardship and discomfort. With time and patience and good organization these things will be set right, and the new scale of allowances which was announced in Parliament yesterday [cheers] will do much to mitigate the lot of wives and children and dependents who are left behind. [Cheers.]

We want more men, and, perhaps most of all, the help for training them. Every one in the whole of this kingdom who has in days gone by, as officer or as non-commissioned officer, served his country never had a greater or more fruitful opportunity for service than is presented to him today. [Cheers.] We appeal to the manhood of the three kingdoms. To such an appeal I know well, coming from your senior representative in the House of Commons, that Scotland will not turn a deaf ear. [Cheers.]

Scotland is doing well, and, indeed, more than well, and no part of Scotland I believe, in proportion, better than Edinburgh. I cannot say with what pleasure I heard the figures given out by the Lord Provost and those which have been supplied to me by the gallant gentleman who has the Scottish command [cheers,] which show, indeed, as we expected, that Scotland is more than holding her own. In that connection let me repeat what I said two weeks ago in London. We think it of the highest importance that so far as possible, and subject to the accidents of war, people belonging to the same place, breathing the same atmosphere, having the same associations, should be kept together.

Our recruits come to us spontaneously, under no kind of compulsion, [cheers,] of their own free will to meet a national and an imperial need. We present to them no material inducement in the shape either of bounty or bribe, and they have to face the prospect of a spell of hard training from which most of the comforts and all the luxuries that any of them have been accustomed to are rigorously banished. But then, when they are fully equipped for their patriotic task, they will have the opportunity of striking a blow, it may be even of laying down their lives, not to serve the cause of ambition or aggression, but to maintain the honor and the good faith of our country, to shield the independence of free States, to protect against brute force the principles of civilization and the liberties of Europe. [Loud cheers.]

* * * * *

MR. ASQUITH AT DUBLIN.

Speech in the Round Room of the Mansion House, Sept. 25.

My Lord Mayor: Some weeks ago I took it upon myself to suggest to the four principal Magistrates of the United Kingdom that they should afford me an opportunity of making a personal appeal to their citizens at a great moment in our national history. I have already delivered my message in London and in Edinburgh. To the first of those great communities I was able to speak as an Englishman by birth and as a Londoner by early association and long residence. To the second, the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Scotland, I had special credentials as having been for the best part of thirty years one of their representatives in the House of Commons, ["Hear, hear!"] and now, indeed, by one of the melancholy privileges of time the senior among the Scottish members. [Laughter.] But, my Lord Mayor, tonight when I come to Dublin I can put forward neither the one claim nor the other. [A Voice--Home Rule.] I base my title, such as it is, to your hospitality and your hearing upon such service as during the whole of my political life I have tried with a whole heart and to the best of my faculties and opportunities to render to Ireland. [Cheers.] I come here, not as a partisan, not even as a politician, but I come here as for the time being the head of the King's Government, [cheers,] to summon Ireland, a loyal and patriotic Ireland, to take her place in the defense of our common cause. [Cheers.] My Lord Mayor, it is no part of my mission tonight, it is indeed at this time of day wholly unnecessary, to justify, still less to excuse, the part which the Government of the United Kingdom has taken in this supreme crisis in our national affairs. There have been wars in the past in regard to which there has been among us diversity of opinion, uneasiness as to the wisdom of our diplomacy, anxiety as to the expediency of our policy, doubts as to the essential righteousness of our cause.

Unity of the Empire.

That, my Lord Mayor, as you said, is not the case today. [Cheers.] Even in the memorable struggle which we waged a hundred years ago against the domination of Napoleon there was always a minority, respectable not merely in number, but in the sincerity and in the eminence of its adherents, which broke the front of our national unity. Again I say that is not the case today. We feel as a nation--or rather I ought to say, speaking here and looking round upon our vast empire in every quarter of the globe--as a family of nations, [prolonged cheers,] without distinction of creed or party, of race or climate, class or section, that we are united in defending principles and in maintaining interests which are vital, not only to the British Empire, but to all that is worth having in our common civilization, [cheers,] and all that is worth hoping for in the future progress of mankind. [Loud cheers.] What better or higher cause, my Lord Mayor, whether we succeed or fail? [Cries of "No failure."] We are going not to fail, but to succeed. [Enthusiastic cheers.] What higher cause than to arouse and enlist the best qualities of a free people, than to be engaged at one and the same time in the vindication of international good faith, in the protection of the weak against the violence of the strong, [cheers,] and in the assertion of the best ideals of all the free communities in all the ages of time and in every part of the world against the encroachments of those who believe and who preach and who practice the religion of force? It is not--I am sure you will agree with me--it is not necessary to demonstrate once more that of this war Germany is the real and the responsible author. [Cheers.] The proofs are patent, manifold and overwhelming. [Cheers.] Indeed, on the part of Germany herself we get upon this point, if denial at all, a denial only of the faintest and the most formal kind. For a generation past she has been preparing the ground, equipping herself, both by land and sea, fortifying herself with alliances, and, what is perhaps even more important, teaching her youth to seek and to pursue as the first and the most important of all human things the supremacy of the German power and the German spirit, and all that time biding her opportunity. Gentlemen, many of the great wars of history have been almost accidentally brought about by the blindness of blundering statesmen, or by some wave of popular passion. That is not so today. ["Hear, hear!"] There was nothing in a quarrel such as this between Austria and Servia that could not have been and that would not have been settled by pacific means. [Cheers.]

Germany's Profound Mistakes.

But in the judgment of those who guide and control German policy the hour had come to strike the blow that had been long and deliberately prepared. In their hands lay the choice between peace and war, and their election was for war. In so deciding, as everybody now knows, Germany made two profound miscalculations. [Cheers.] Both of them natural enough in a man who had come to believe that in international matters everything can be explained and measured in terms of material force. What, gentlemen, were those mistakes? The first was that Belgium, [cheers,] a small and prosperous country entirely disinterested in European quarrels, guaranteed by the joint and several compacts of the great powers, that Belgium would not resent, and certainly would not resist, the use of her territory as a highroad for an invading German force into France. How could they imagine that this little country, rather than allow her neutrality to be violated and her independence insulted and menaced, was prepared that her fields should be drenched with the blood of her soldiers, her towns and villages devastated by marauders, her splendid heritage of monuments and of treasures, built up for her by the piety, art, and learning of the past, ruthlessly laid in ruins? The passionate attachment of a numerically small population to the bit of territory, which looks so little upon the map, the pride and the unconquerable devotion of a free people to their own free State, these were things which apparently had never been dreamed of in the philosophy of Potsdam. [Laughter and "Hear, hear!"] Rarely in history has there been a greater material disparity between the invaders and the invaded, but the moral disparity was at least equally great. [Cheers.] For, gentlemen, the indomitable resistance of the Belgians did more than change the whole face of the campaign. [Cheers.] It proved to the world that ideas which cannot be weighed or measured by any material calculus can still inspire and dominate mankind. [Cheers.] And that is the reason why the whole sympathy of the civilized world at this moment is going out to these small States--Belgium, Servia, and Montenegro--that have played so worthy a part in this historic struggle. [Cheers.]

The Moral Bond of Civilization.

But, my Lord Mayor, Germany was guilty of another and a still more capital blunder in relation to ourselves. ["Hear, hear!"] I am not referring for the moment to the grotesque understanding upon which I dwelt a week ago at Edinburgh, their carefully fostered belief that we here were so rent with civil distraction, [laughter,] so paralyzed by luke-warmness or disaffection in our dominions and dependencies, that if it came to fighting we might be brushed aside as an impotent and even a negligible factor. [Cheers and cries of "Never!"] The German misconception went even deeper than that. They asked themselves what interest, direct or material, had the United Kingdom in this conflict? Could any nation, least of all the cold, calculating, phlegmatic, egotistic British nation, [laughter,] embark upon a costly and bloody contest from which it had nothing in the hope of profit to expect? ["Hear, hear!"] They forgot--they forgot that we, like the Belgians, had something at stake which cannot be translated into what one of our poets has called "The law of nicely calculated less or more." What was it we had at stake? First and foremost, the fulfillment to the small and relatively weak country of our plighted word [cheers] and behind and beyond that the maintenance of the whole system of international good-will which is the moral bond of the civilized world. [Cheers.] Here again they were wrong in thinking that the reign of ideas, Old World ideas like those of duty and good faith, had been superseded by the ascendency of force. My Lord Mayor, war is at all times a hideous thing; at the best an evil to be chosen in preference to worse evils, and at the worst little better than the letting loose of hell upon earth. The prophet of old spoke of the "confused noise of battle and the garments rolled in blood," but in these modern days, with the gigantic scale of the opposing armies and the scientific developments of the instruments of destruction, war has become an infinitely more devastating thing than it ever was before. The hope that the general recognition of a humaner code would soften or abate some of its worst brutalities has been rudely dispelled by the events of the last few weeks. ["Shame!"]

Shameful and Cynical Desecration.

The German invasion of Belgium and France contributes, indeed, some of the blackest pages to its sombre annals. Rarely has a non-combatant population suffered more severely, and rarely, if ever, have the monuments of piety and of learning and those sentiments of religion and national association, of which they are the permanent embodiment, even in the worst times of the most ruthless warriors, been so shamefully and cynically desecrated; and behind the actual theatre of conflict with its smoke and its carnage there are the sufferings of those who are left behind, the waste of wealth, the economic dislocation, the heritage, the long heritage of enmities and misunderstanding which war brings in its train. Why do I dwell upon these things? It is to say this, that great indeed is the responsibility of those who allow their country--as we have done--to be drawn into such a welter; but there is one thing much worse than to take such a responsibility, and that is, upon a fitting occasion, to shirk it. [Cheers.] Our record in the matter is clear. We strove up to the last moment for peace [cheers] and only when we were satisfied that the price of peace was the betrayal of other countries and the dishonor and degradation of our own we took up the sword. [Prolonged cheers.] I should like, if I might for a moment, beyond this inquiry into causes and motives, to ask your attention and that of my fellow-countrymen to the end which in this war we ought to keep in view. Forty-four years ago, at the time of the war of 1870, Mr. Gladstone used these words. He said: "The greatest triumph of our time will be the enthronement of the idea of public right as the governing idea of European politics." Nearly fifty years have passed. Little progress, it seems, has yet been made toward that good and beneficent change, but it seems to me to be now at this moment as good a definition as we can have of our European policy. The idea of public right; what does it mean when translated into concrete terms? It means, first and foremost, the clearing of the ground by the definite repudiation of militarism as the governing factor in the relation of States, and of the future molding of the European world. It means, next, that room must be found and kept for the independent existence and the free development of the smaller nationalities, [cheers,] each with a corporate consciousness of its own.

The Recognition of Nationality.

Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries, Greece, and the Balkan States, they must be recognized as having exactly as good a title as their more powerful neighbors--more powerful in strength and in wealth--exactly as good a title to a place in the sun. [Prolonged cheers and some laughter.] And it means, finally, or it ought to mean, perhaps by a slow and gradual process, the substitution for force, for the clash of competing ambition, for grouping and alliances and a precarious equipoise, the substitution for all these things of a real European partnership, based on the recognition of equal right and established and enforced by a common will. [Cheers.] A year ago that would have sounded like a Utopian idea. It is probably one that may not or will not be realized either today or tomorrow. If and when this war is decided in favor of the Allies, it will at once come within the range, and, before long, within the grasp of European statesmanship. [Cheers.] I go back for a moment, if I am not keeping you too long, ["Go on,"] to the peculiar aspects of the actual case upon which I have dwelt, because it seems to me that they ought to make a special appeal to the people of Ireland. Ireland is a loyal country, [cheers,] and she would, I know, respond with alacrity to any summons which called upon her to take her share in the assertion and the defense of our common interests. But, gentlemen, the issues raised by this war are of such a kind that, unless I mistake her people and misrepresent her history, they touch a vibrating chord both in her imagination and in her conscience. How can you Irishmen be deaf to the cry of the smaller nationalities to help them in their struggle for freedom [cheers] whether, as in the case of Belgium, in maintaining what she has won, or as in the case of Poland or the Balkan States in regaining what they have lost or in acquiring and putting upon a stable foundation what has never been fully theirs?

The Appeal to Ireland.

How again can you Irishmen--if I understand you--sit by in cool detachment and with folded arms while we, in company of our gallant allies of France and Russia, are opposing a worldwide resistance to pretensions which threaten to paralyze and sterilize all progress and the best destinies of mankind? [Cheers.] During the last few weeks Sir John French and his heroic forces have worthily sustained our cause. The casualties have been heavy. Ireland has had her share, although they have been increased during the last week from the ranks of our gallant navy by one of the hazards of warfare at sea. But of those who have fallen in both services we may ask how could men die better? [Cheers.]

The Indian Contingent.

They have left behind them an example and an appeal. From all quarters of the empire its best manhood is flowing in. The first Indian contingent is, I believe, landing today at Marseilles, [loud cheers,] and in all parts of our great dominions the convoys are already mustering. Over half a million recruits have joined the colors here at home, [cheers,] and I come to ask you in Ireland, though you don't need my asking, to take your part. [Cheers and shouts of "We must."] There was a time when, through the operations of laws which every one now acknowledges to have been both unjust and impolitic, ["Hear, hear!"] the martial spirit of and the capacity for which Irishmen have always been conspicuous, found its chief outlet in the alien armies of the Continent. I have seen it computed--I do not know whether with precise accuracy--but I have seen it computed upon good authority that in the first fifty years of the eighteenth century, when the penal laws were here in full swing, nearly half a million Irishmen enlisted under the banners of the empire of France and Spain, and we at home in the United Kingdom suffered a double loss; for, gentlemen, not only were we drained year by year of some of our best fighting material, ["Hear, hear!"] but over and over again we found ourselves engaged in battle array suffering and inflicting deadly loss upon those who might have been, and under happier conditions would have been, fellow-soldiers of our own. [Cheers.] The British Empire has always been proud, and with reason, of those Irish regiments [cheers] and their Irish leaders, [more cheers,] and was never prouder of them that it is today. [Great cheering.] We ask you here in Ireland to give us more, [cheers, and a Voice, "You'll get them,"] to give them without stinting. We ask Ireland to give of her sons, the most in number, the best in quality that a proud and loyal daughter of the empire ought to devote to the common cause. [Cheers.]

The Volunteers of Ireland.

The conditions seem to me to be exceptionally favorable for the purpose. We have of late been witnessing here in Ireland a spontaneous enrollment and organization in all parts of the country of bodies of volunteers. I say nothing--for I wish tonight to avoid trespassing upon even a square inch of controversial ground--I say nothing of the causes or motives which brought them originally into existence, [laughter,] and have fostered their growth and strength. I will only say--and this is my nearest approach to politics tonight--that there are two things which to my mind have become unthinkable. The first is that one section of Irishmen are going to fight. [Loud cheers.] The second is that Great Britain is going to fight either. [Renewed cheers.] Speaking here in Dublin, I may perhaps address myself for a moment particularly to the National Volunteers, and I am going to ask them all over Ireland--not only them, but I make the appeal to them particularly--to contribute with promptitude and enthusiasm a large and worthy contingent of recruits to the second new army of half a million, which is growing up as it were out of the ground. [Cheers.] I should like to see, and we all want to see, an Irish brigade, [cheers,] or, better still, an Irish army corps. [Loud cheers.] Do not let them be afraid that by joining the colors they will lose their identity and become absorbed in some invertebrate mass, or, what is perhaps equally repugnant, be artificially redistributed in units which have no national cohesion or character. We wish to the utmost limit that military exigencies will allow that men who have been already associated in this or that district in training and in common exercises should be kept together and continue to recognize the corporate bond which now unites them. ["Hear, hear!"] And of one thing further I am sure. We are in urgent need of competent officers, and we think that if the officers now engaged in training these men are proved equal to the test, there is no fear that their services will not be gladly and gratefully retained. I repeat that the empire needs recruits, and needs them at once, that they may be fully trained and equipped in time to take their part in what may well be the decisive fields of the greatest struggle in the history of the world. That is our immediate necessity, and no Irishman in responding to it need be afraid that he is prejudicing the future of the volunteers. [Cheers.] I do not say, and I can not say, under what precise form or organization, but I trust and believe, and indeed I am certain, that the volunteers will become a permanent part, an integral and a characteristic part, of the defensive forces of the Crown. [Cheers.] I have only one more thing to say to you. [Cries of "Go on."] If our need is great your opportunity is also great. [Cheers.] The call which I am making is, as you know well, backed by the sympathy of your fellow-Irishmen in all parts of the empire and the world. Old animosities between us are dead. [Loud and prolonged cheers.] Scattered like the Autumn leaves to the four winds of heaven, we are a united nation, [renewed cheers,] owing and paying to our sovereign the heartfelt allegiance of men who at home not only love but enjoy for themselves the liberty which our soldiers and our sailors are fighting by land and by sea to maintain and to extend for others. There is no question of compulsion or bribery. What we want we believe you are ready and eager to give as the free-will offering of a free people. [Great cheering.]

The Earl of Meath, Lord Lieutenant of County Dublin, who was next called on, declared that their gathering would be historic because for the first time in her history Irishmen of all classes, creeds, and politics had met on the same platform. The modern Attila might be known, as his predecessor was known, as the scourge of God. But for the constant vigilance of our army and our fleet Ireland might have met the fate of Belgium. He suggested that Earl Kitchener should, as far as possible, see that the Irish corps at the front should act together.

* * * * *

MR. ASQUITH AT CARDIFF.

Speech in the Skating Rink, Oct. 2.

In the course of the last month I have addressed meetings in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, and now in the completion of the task which I set myself and which the kindness of our great municipalities has allowed me to perform I have come to Cardiff. [Cheers.] England, Scotland, and Ireland have each of them a definite and a well-established capital city, but I have always understood that there was some doubt where the capital of the Principality of Wales was to be found on the map. [Laughter.] Wales is a single and indivisible entity with a life of its own, drawing its vitality from an ancient past, and both, I believe, in the volume and in the reality of its activity, never more virile than it is today. [Cheers.] But I do not know that there is any general agreement among Welshmen as to where their capital is to be found, [laughter, and a voice, "Here,"] and without attempting as an outsider to differentiate or to reconcile competing claims I stand here tonight on what I believe to be a safe coign of vantage under the hospitality and the authority of the Lord Mayor of Cardiff.

Though I am not altogether a stranger to Wales, you may nevertheless ask why I have requested your permission to address this great audience here tonight. I am not altogether an idle man, and during the last few months I can honestly say that there has hardly been a day, indeed there have been very few hours, which have not been preoccupied with grave cares and responsibility. But throughout them all I have been, and I am, sustained by a profound and unshakable belief in the righteousness of our cause [cheers] and by overwhelming evidence that in the pursuit and the maintenance of that cause the Government have behind them, without distinction of race, of party, or of class, the whole moral and material support of the British Empire. [Cheers.] Let me take the opportunity to acknowledge and to welcome the calm, reasoned, and dignified statement of our cause which the Christian Churches of the United Kingdom, through some of their most distinguished leaders and ministers, have this week presented to the world. [Cheers.]

The United Voice of the Empire.

I will not repeat, and I certainly cannot improve upon it, and indeed I am not here tonight to argue out propositions which British citizens in every part of the world today regard as beyond the reach of controversy. I do not suppose that in the history of mankind there has ever been in such a vast and diverse community agreement so unanimous in purpose and so concentrated, a corporate conscience so clear and so convinced, co-operation so spontaneous, so ardent, and so resolute. [Cheers.] Just consider what it means, here in this United Kingdom--England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales--to hear one plain, harmonious, great united voice over the seas from our great dominions. [Cheers.] Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, our crown colonies, swell the chorus.

In India [cheers]--where whatever we won by the sword we hold and we retain by the more splendid title of just and disinterested rule by the authority, not of a despot, but of a trustee [cheers]--the response to our common appeal has moved all our feelings to their profoundest depths, and has been such as to shiver and to shatter the vain and ignorant imaginings of our enemies. [Cheers,] That is a remarkable and indeed a unique spectacle.

What is it that stirred the imagination, aroused the conscience, enlisted the manhood, welded into one compact and irresistible force the energies and the greatest imperial structure that the world has ever known? [Cheers.] That is a question which, for a moment at any rate, it is well worth asking and answering. Let me say, then, first negatively, that we are not impelled, any of us, by some of the motives which have occasioned the bloody struggles of the past. In this case, so far as we are concerned, ambition and aggression play no part. What do we want? What do we aim at? What have we to gain?

We are a great, worldwide, peace-loving partnership. By the wisdom and the courage of our forefathers, by great deeds of heroism and adventure by land and sea, by the insight and corporate sagacity, the tried and tested experience of many generations, we have built up a dominion which is buttressed by the two pillars of liberty and law. [Cheers.] We are not vain enough or foolish enough to think that in the course of a long process there have not been blunders, or worse than blunders, and that today our dominion does not fall short of what in our ideals it might and it ought and, we believe, it is destined to be. But such as we have received it and such as we hope to have it, with it we are content. [Cheers.]

Why We Are at War.

We do not covet any people's territory. We have no desire to impose our rule upon alien populations. The British Empire is enough for us. [Laughter and cheers.] All that we wished for, all that we wish for now, is to be allowed peaceably to consolidate our own resources, to raise within the empire the level of common opportunity, to draw closer the bond of affection and confidence between its parts, and to make it everywhere the worthy home of the best traditions of British liberty. [Cheers.] Does it not follow from that that nowhere in the world is there a people who have stronger motives to avoid war and to seek and ensue peace? Why, then, are the British people throughout the length and breadth of our empire everywhere turning their plowshares into swords? Why are the best of our ablebodied men leaving the fields and the factory and the counting house for the recruiting office and the training camp?

If, as I have said, we have no desire to add to our imperial burdens, either in area or in responsibility, it is equally true that in entering this war we had no ill-will to gratify nor wrongs of our own to avenge. ["Hear, hear!"] In regard to Germany in particular [groans] our policy--repeatedly stated in Parliament, resolutely pursued year after year both in London and in Berlin--our policy has been to remove one by one the outstanding causes of possible friction and so to establish a firm basis for cordial relations in the days to come.

We have said from the first--I have said it over and over again, and so has Sir Edward Grey--we have said from the first that our friendships with certain powers, with France, [cheers,] with Russia, and with Japan, were not to be construed as implying cold feelings and still less hostile purposes against any other power. But at the same time we have always made it clear, to quote words used by Sir Edward Grey as far back as November, 1911--I quote his exact words--"One does not make new friendships worth having by deserting old ones." New friendships by all means let us have, but not at the expense of the ones we have. That has been, and I trust will always be, the attitude of those whom the Kaiser in his now notorious proclamation describes as the treacherous English. [Laughter and "Oh, oh!"]

Germany's Demand in 1912.

We laid down, and I wish to call not only your attention but the attention of the whole world to this, when so many false legends are now being invented and circulated, in the following year--in the year 1912--we laid down in terms carefully approved by the Cabinet, and which I will textually quote, what our relations with Germany ought in our view to be. We said, and we communicated this to the German Government, "Britain declares that she will neither make nor join in any unprovoked attack upon Germany. Aggression upon Germany is not the subject and forms no part of any treaty, understanding, or combination to which Britain is now a party, nor will she become a party to anything that has such an object." There is nothing ambiguous or equivocal about that. ["Hear, hear!"]

But that was not enough for German statesmanship. They wanted us to go further. They asked us to pledge ourselves absolutely to neutrality in the event of Germany being engaged in war, and this, mind you, at a time when Germany was enormously increasing both her aggressive and defensive resources, and especially upon the sea. They asked us, to put it quite plainly, for a free hand, so far as we were concerned, when they selected the opportunity to overbear, to dominate the European world.

To such a demand but one answer was possible, and that was the answer we gave. [Cheers.] None the less we have continued during the whole of the last two years, and never more energetically and more successfully than during the Balkan crisis of last year, to work not only for the peace of Europe but for the creation of a better international atmosphere and a more cordial co-operation between all the powers. [Cheers.] From both points of view, that of our domestic interests as a kingdom and an empire, and that of our settled attitude and policy in the counsels of Europe, a war such as this, which injures the one and frustrates the other, was and could only be regarded as among the worst of catastrophes--among the worst of catastrophes, but not the worst. [Cheers.]

"The Blackest Annals of Barbarism."

Four weeks ago, speaking at the Guildhall, in the City of London, when the war was still in its early days, I asked my fellow-countrymen with what countenance, with what conscience, had we basely chose to stand aloof, we could have watched from day to day the terrible unrolling of events--public faith shamelessly broken, the freedom of a small people trodden in the dust, the wanton invasion of Belgium and then of France by hordes who leave behind them at every stage of their progress a dismal trail of savagery, of devastation, and of desecration worthy of the blackest annals in the history of barbarism. [Cheers.] That was four weeks ago. The war has now lasted for sixty days, and every one of those days has added to the picture its share of sombre and repulsive traits. We now see clearly written down in letters of carnage and spoliation the real aims and methods of this long-prepared and well-organized scheme Against the liberties of Europe. [Cheers.]

I say nothing of other countries. I pass no judgment upon them. But if we here in Great Britain had abstained and remained neutral, forsworn our word, deserted our friends, faltered and compromised with the plain dictates of our duty--nay, if we had not shown ourselves ready to strike with all our forces at the common enemy of civilization and freedom, there would have been nothing left for our country but to veil her face in shame and to be ready in her turn--for her time would have come--to share the doom which she would have richly deserved, and after centuries of glorious life to go down to her grave, unwept, unhonored, and unsung. [Loud cheers.]

Let us gladly acknowledge what becomes clearer and clearer every day, that the world is just as ready as it ever was, and no part of it readier than the British Empire, to understand and to respond to moral issues. [Cheers.] The new school of German thought has been teaching for a generation past that in the affairs of nations there is no code of ethics. According to their doctrine force and nothing but force is the test and the measure of right. As the events which are going on before our eyes have made it plain, they have succeeded only too well in indoctrinating with their creed--I will not say the people of Germany; like Burke, I will not attempt to draw up an indictment against a nation--I will not say the people of Germany, but those who control and execute German policy. [Cheers.]