EARL OF ROSEBERY
[Speech at a great patriotic meeting held at Broxburn, Linlithgow, on Saturday, September 5, 1914. The delivering of this speech created a profound impression, being marked by passionate emphasis and dramatic gesture.]
Colonel Chalmers:— When you telegraphed to me yesterday to ask me to come here to-day I telegraphed back at once to say I would, and come gladly—not to make a long speech, not to dilate on any of the current topics to which in times of peace you are so accustomed, but to talk for a moment about this terrible war, and the causes which have led up to it. We meet at a very solemn moment in the history of our country—more solemn, I think, than any that has occurred in the history of the world. And yet a month ago—let us say on the first of August—we were all at peace. There was scarcely a thought of war. And within a month our armies have been hewing their way through desperate odds. We have had two lists of casualties, and may soon have a third or a fourth. Our Fleet has been in action, and the whole face of Europe is convulsed, as by an earthquake, with the march of millions of armed men. What a change, and in so short a time! And how did this change come about? We shall not know for some years to come the secret history of what brought about this war. But we know the simple outside facts, the simple surface facts, that Austria declared war against Servia, that Russia declared she must stand by Servia, that Germany said she must stand by Austria, and that France said she must stand by Russia.
It was really a spark in the midst of this great powder magazine which the nations of Europe have been building up for the past twenty or thirty years—a spark alighting in that tremendous powder magazine, which, with infinite toil—misapplied toil, I think—the nations of Europe have been constructing. When you go on building up armaments against each other there comes a time when either the guns go off by themselves, or else the people say: "We can no longer bear this burden of suspense; we had better make an end of it, and
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