a tender straining spirit the dread news that strikes desolation to the heart. And with these aims, aspirations, and beliefs, here we are, Mr. Stead, plunged into the most horrible war the world has ever known.
All the old causes you and I cherished so dearly set aside! Never in our lives, now, shall we see them advanced to the stage we had fondly hoped. The millions, so hard to get for education, housing, sounder health, greater comfort, they slip away! They slip away for stores, projectiles, transport, and sorrow, misery, and suffering are their deadly harvest.
Dear lads! Dear lads! They went from amongst us with a cheer and a song on their lips. Many lie in a foreign grave; many beneath the wave. For tens of thousands of homes 1915 comes in, deep-edged with grief and mourning. And yet, horrible as it all is, we had no alternative. Today closes the fifth month of this dreadful business. I was deeply convinced on August 4 that we were right to draw the sword against Germany. Every day of the 152 that has since passed has deepened that conviction. It was none of our seeking, none of our making. So far back as 1912 we made this declaration to Germany:
"Britain declares 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.
Through every hour of the weeks preceding this dreadful war, Sir Edward Grey strove for peace as no man had striven before. Germany alone would not say the word which might have spared Europe this awful scourge. Why? To find the answer you have to go back to 1870. In that year Germany conquered and humiliated France, and out of the smoke and welter of Woerth and Saarbruck, and Sedan, and Strasburg and Metz, there emerged a new figure, startling, menacing, full of grave portent. It had crushed France under its iron heel; it proceeded to conquer Germany. It was the figure of arrogant, intolerant, bullying Prussian militarism. Its watchword!—Might is Right. Its Court of Arbitration!—the parade ground. Its argument!—shrapnel and the siege gun. Its decalogue!—the drill book.
Just as it had put its heel upon France, so it crushed out the genial old philosophic German spirit.
