country were liable to military service, as they are in Germany, in Russia, and in France, the number of men who would at the present moment be under arms from the Principality of Wales would be at least a quarter of a million. We have escaped conscription. We are not liable to the military tyranny which dominates the Continent. We have the protection of the seas. They roll round us, and here we are in a castle with a magnificent moat splendidly guarded. [Loud applause.] All the more honour to us, therefore, if we voluntarily render service to our country—[hear, hear]—and if 250,000 would have been under arms now in any conscripted country it is not too much to ask for a volunteer army of 50,000—[hear, hear]—and a volunteer army of 50,000 is just as good as a forced army of 250,000. [Loud applause.]
Well, how are we to go about it? We propose in these resolutions—the first of the series of which I am moving—to set up a committee for the purpose of organizing the whole of Wales. The first thing that we have to do is to explain clearly the causes of the war and the overwhelming motives which have impelled this country to enter upon so serious a course. It is not that there is a single man, woman, or child of intelligent years who does not understand, but you have to saturate the minds of the people with the real reasons that moved Britain to embark upon this gigantic operation. There is one special reason for that. There is no time to devote to the training of men—at least there is not sufficient time according to the ordinary rules of training—to convert them into expert soldiers. It takes—I forget how many—a year or two years—in every Continental army I think two years as a minimum. You cannot have that, and, therefore, you have got to make up in zeal, in ardour, in enthusiasm, in the qualities that constitute morale for the defect of training; and that is a very important matter when you go to action. It is only the mere martinet who ignores the immense value of these attributes from a military point of view. Every great soldier has attributed the greatest importance to that.
There have been three, I think, notable instances in fairly recent history when nations have raised in a hurry great armies in order to meet better trained troops than themselves. There is the case of the revolutionary army of France raised in order to drive back the highly-trained troops of Prussia and Austria. There is the case of the civil war in America, and there is the case of 1870, when Gambetta raised huge levies in order to
