RT. HON. T. J. MACNAMARA
[Speech by the Parliamentary and Financial Secretary to the Admiralty, at the Browning Hall Settlement, Walworth, London, on Sunday, January 3, 1915, the Warden, the Rev. F. Herbert Stead, M.A., in the chair.]
Year by year, you and I, Mr. Stead, have come here on this day to consider together the prospects of the New Year. We have compared notes as to progress in the Old Year; we have built our hopes of progress in the New.
We have considered the position of Education, Housing, the Poor Law, Old Age Pensions, National Insurance. We have taken stock of advances made. We have formed resolutions as to aims to be achieved in the year before us.
We had no thought save for peace—peace and a quiet time in which we could more and more stamp the golden rule upon our civilization, cure our social shortcomings, and broaden and deepen the foundations of free government dug out and laid for us by the faith, courage, and endurance of our forefathers. We envied no peoples. We rejoiced in the prosperity of all. Peace was our greatest interest.
War! We shrank in horror from the very thought of it. We knew it to be the devilish negation of civilization and Christianity. We foresaw, that, calling in its aid, as it would do, the developments of modern science applied to the fiendish work of destruction, it would spread devastation, ruin, and human suffering to a degree beyond the limit of the mind to realize and measure. We pleaded for the settlement of international disagreements by peaceful arbitrament. You, Mr. Stead, have always been honourably associated with that endeavour. We hated, loathed, and detested the very thought of war.
We knew that even victorious armies come home to broken hearts, widowed mothers, orphaned children, maimed lives. We knew that even while the paper boys cry along the streets the glorious tidings of British victory there comes to many
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