RT. HON. H. H. ASQUITH
[Speech at a great recruiting meeting held in Usher Hall, Edinburgh, on Friday, September 18, 1914.]
My Lord Provost, My Lords and Gentlemen:—A fortnight ago to-day in the Guildhall of the City of London I endeavoured to present to the nation and to the world the reasons which have compelled us, the people of all others which have the greatest interest in the maintenance of peace, to engage in the hazards and the horrors of war. I do not wish to repeat to-night in any detail what I then said. The war has arisen immediately and ostensibly, as every one knows, out of a dispute between Austria and Servia, in which we in this country had no direct concern.
The diplomatic history of those critical weeks, the last fortnight in July and the first few days of August, is now accessible to all the world. It has been supplemented during the last few days by the admirable and exhaustive dispatch of our late Ambassador at Vienna, Sir Maurice de Bunsen, a dispatch which, I trust, everybody will read; and no one who reads it can doubt that largely through the efforts of my right honourable friend and colleague, Sir Edward Grey—[loud cheers]—the conditions of a peaceful settlement of the actual controversy were already within sight, when, on July 31, Germany, by her own deliberate act, made war a certainty. The facts are incontrovertible.
They are not sought to be controverted, except, indeed, by the invention and circulation of such wanton falsehoods as that France was contemplating, and even commencing, a violation of Belgian territory as the first step on her road to Germany. The result is, my Lord Provost, we are at war, and we are at war, as I have already shown elsewhere, and as I repeat here to-night—we are at war for three reasons.
In the first place, to vindicate the sanctity of treaty obligations—[cheers]—and of what is properly called the public law of Europe—[cheers]—in the second place to assert and to
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