furnished to the speaker by experts in the business of transporting troops by sea.
Whether Mr. Balfour's assurances would have long been accounted satisfactory, had France remained the object of British suspicion, it is impossible to say, for hardly had his reassuring words been spoken than a new direction was given to the nation's fears, and, in an incredibly short time, Germany—a country with which we had always been on good terms, and whose commercial prosperity is bound up with our own—was accepted as the national foe.
It is not my business to trace the causes of this extraordinary change of thought and feeling; suffice it to say that it coincided with a struggle to establish conscription as the basis of our military system, and that lurid pictures of Germany's military strength, naval growth, and official efficiency, coupled with boldly expressed distrust of her aims and doubts of her good faith, were, and are
