and by their professors, and this is the result. Prussian militarism and the cruel gospel of blood and iron has altered the aims and has changed the whole character of the German people. [Hear, hear.] Until quite recently the Germans were as little materialistic as any nation—were perhaps the most idealistic of all, and so much so that it was once said of them, and with greater truth than generally applies to such generalization, that while Britain ruled the sea and France the land, Germany ruled the clouds—[laughter]—not with aeroplanes, but with the spirit. All that has changed. They have pulled down their old altars on which glowed the sacred fire which shed its spiritual radiance throughout the world. They have pulled down these altars, and they have erected instead a great temple to their new god, a god of naked force, which knows no blessedness except victory, which knows no right except the right of the sword. That is the spirit against which we are fighting to-day, and not for the first time. A hundred years ago our fathers waged the same battle, and they fought it successfully. [Cheers.] This is Napoleonism once again, but it is Napoleonism without the genius of Napoleon. [Cheers.] There are many resemblances between the two struggles. The part which is being played by our Navy to-day is the same part which was played by it a hundred years ago. Our sailors to-day are keeping a constant, a dangerous, and a wearing vigil on the North Sea, on which the life and very existence of the Empire depends. How unwearying it is and how dangerous was shown in the loss of the three cruisers the other day, which filled our hearts with sorrow not because they meant anything in the war, but because of the loss of life that they involved. But though they filled our hearts with sorrow, we had pride too, for we found that the old spirit still animated our seamen—[cheers]—that in that supreme hour officers and men, without selfishness and without panic, passed nobly to a noble death. [Cheers.] The same vigil was kept by our Fleet a hundred years ago. For something like three years Nelson watched the French ships outside Toulon. Again and again they were driven away by the storms, but they always came back. He had his reward, and at Trafalgar he destroyed for ever the power of Napoleon to touch these shores. But, gentlemen, the greatest analogy is moral. It was the aggression of Napoleon which slowly but surely roused against him the moral forces of the world, and those forces found expression in the war of liberation which
