Page:Great Speeches of the War.djvu/64

 RT. HON. A. J. BALFOUR


 * —This is not the first time that I have addressed a Bristol audience. Nor is it the first time I have spoken in this hall. But when I appeared last before you it was as speaking for a party—a party in which I believe, and of which I am still as ardent a member as ever. [Cheers.] But now my friend, Mr. Brace, and I, feeling that all smaller questions must be brushed into oblivion, have come here to make an appeal to you upon the greatest of all national causes. If, say, fifteen or twenty years ago any man had prophesied that within the lifetime of those whom he was addressing a war would spring up, in which one great community in America, the whole of Australasia, by far the greater part of Africa, by far the greater part of Asia, and by far the greater part of Europe should simultaneously be engaged, I think that prophecy would have been looked on as the nightmare of a mad-man. [Hear, hear.]

It has come about. And if the prophet who made this forecast had been asked, How can these things be in modern civilization, with the telegraph, the railway, all the modern contrivances for conquering nature multiplying day by day?—how would he have felt if he had been told it was by these very inventions, from this very progress in knowledge, science, and civilization, it had been possible to marshal together these hosts of a magnitude of which history gives us no parallel or record, and to bring them up against one another for mutual slaughter?

And if again he had been asked if such a war is to be will it not at all events be waged in circumstances of a growing humanitarianism; will it not be waged under new conditions, where at all events the non-combatants would be saved from all needless suffering; and if the seer had proclaimed in answer 48