I care very little, gentlemen, about that sort of construction. As the Irishman said, "You cannot turn your back upon yourself"—[laughter]—and even the Chancellor of the German Empire cannot perform that remarkable acrobatic feat. [Laughter.]
As regards the causes of the war, our hands are pure and clean, our conscience is clear—[cheers]—and we may safely leave to the verdict history shall pronounce upon our efforts on our intervention with regard to the beginning of this war. [Cheers.] Why did the Chancellor make this speech? He cannot have expected anybody to believe it, not even the audience which he addressed, though that has been abundantly fed on falsehood ever since the beginning of the war. I think he did it because he wanted a new stimulus to the hatred of this country which is now felt in Germany. It was for that he invented this new theory of the beginning of the war. The hatred certainly exists, and it is a factor in our future which we cannot afford to neglect. But the hatred has been one of long standing. For years at the Prussian messes the officers have drunk as their supreme toast, "The Day." What day? The day of the utter humiliation and defeat of Great Britain. [Cheers.] But there is an additional reason for that hatred now which makes it mount at compound interest. We have spoilt their game. [Cheers.] Their idea was to march into France and get rid of the hostility of France—a successful campaign of a week or ten days—then fall on Russia and annihilate Russia, as the armies of Germany are by far, I suppose, the best organized and best drilled in the world, and when those two great rivals had been annihilated the course would have been simple and easy to march on Great Britain, and make an end of that too presumptuous Empire which threatened to vie in commerce and prosperity with God-given Germany. [A voice—"Never."]
Well, with or without this hatred, whatever the cause of it may be, we have to face the fact that the two Empires—because it is intrinsically they who are facing each other—the two Empires are ranged in a death-struggle, a struggle of life or death, and nothing less; we have to realize that the two Empires are facing each other in a contest for supremacy and existence, the contest for the supremacy of two contending principles, one of liberty and the other of oppression, a contest for existence between two Empires that are not accustomed or willing to submit. Is not that a sufficiently
