Page:Great Speeches of the War.djvu/55

Rh might have been spared half her suffering. Had our recruits been trained already, we should not have to wait till next spring before they will be prepared. I hope I am not unduly intruding upon politics if I say that when this war is over, and if I am spared, no effort of mine will be wanting to make my countrymen, as they have had to pay the price of neglect, pay the price also to obtain the security which it will be necessary for us ever afterwards to maintain. But Lord Roberts has not been the only one; there have been a few others equally prescient in their utterances—Mr. Frederic Harrison, an old Radical, but a man of great intelligence and indomitable courage; Mr. Hyndman, a Socialist of whom I have never previously spoken one admiring word; Mr. Robert Blatchford, and others—all honour to these men who foretold the danger, though they could not persuade their countrymen to listen.

And now I turn to the practical application of the German theories in the present war. What has happened in Belgium is only the logical outcome. Consider the case of Belgium—a small country, inhabited before the war broke out by a peaceful and industrious people, only 7½ millions in number—the same population as is included in the Metropolitan Police District of London—and ruled by a patriotic and constitutional King. They were protected by treaty from fear of invasion; they cherished no military ambitions; they were innocent of offence, the friends of all, and the enemies of none. Suddenly, on August 2 last, they were confronted with the ultimatum from Germany which compelled them to decide. You remember the lines of the American poet:—

Belgium made her choice. All alone, unaided, without allies to help her in the field, she threw herself across the path of the tyrant. She might so easily have yielded and have saved her territory, her treasures and her homes. No one could fairly have blamed her for the surrender. But no, she loved liberty more; she preferred death to slavery, she would not yield to brute force. And what has been her fate? I remember that on Speech Days at Eton the boys would sometimes declaim the famous passage in Burke's speech on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts, in which that great orator drew the tears of his audience at Westminster by the passage in which