If you win you may not do more than continue to exist and develop, but if you lose you are shattered and damned. [Loud cheers.]
Now let me take you for one moment from that aspect of the case to the history of this war. I am not going into the old details you have heard so often about the Note to Servia and that business, but it does become necessary when I have addressed such an appeal to you, to ask how is it we are involved in this vital struggle for our existence? How is it we have staked everything on such a hazard as that? Well, all I can say, in the first place, is, we exhausted every effort for peace. [Cheers.] Sir Edward Grey, as representing the Government—[cheers]—exhausted every means, and I honestly do believe if he had had two or three days more, and honest Governments to work with, he would have achieved his object. Whatever efforts he made there was one Power which had the greatest influence in Europe, and which might have preserved peace—there was one Power which would never second his efforts, and that was Germany. Nay, more, at the very moment when Austria and Russia had been brought to exchange views, when Austria renounced solemnly all prospect of territorial acquisition, and when she was in conversation with Russia as to the terms on which guarantees might be given to Austria, when there was really a fair prospect of peace, what did peace-loving Prussia do? She sent an ultimatum to Russia across these negotiations, to make certain that war must take place. [Cheers.] The Chancellor of Germany made a speech the other day, which you may have read, in which he put an entirely new aspect on the case—a different aspect, in fact, from that which he put on in the beginning of the war. In the beginning of the war he said he had done wrong. He admitted he had committed a gross breach of public law and the rules that govern neutrality in Europe. He said he hoped to be able to atone for it. He has atoned for it. He has ravaged the country he promised to guarantee. He has destroyed every historic building; he has driven out the whole populations; and that is atoning for the breach of neutrality which he confessed at first. In this second speech all that disappears. He was a guilty penitent then; now he is the one person who promoted peace, and the devil, the demon, the wicked, and venomous Power that all the time interfered with his benevolent efforts, and schemed the war, was the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. [Laughter.]
