such a war as that while the breath in my body is continued to me I am ready to engage." [Loud cheers.]
So much as to our own action in the past in regard to treaties and small States. But, my Lord Provost, faint as is the denial of this part of our case, it becomes fainter still; it dissolves into the thinnest of thin air when it has to deal with our contention that we and our Allies are withstanding a Power whose aim is nothing less than the domination of Europe. It is, indeed, the avowed belief of the leaders of German thought—I will not say of the German people—of those who, for many years past, have controlled German policy, that such a domination, carrying with it the supremacy of what they call German culture—[laughter]—and the German spirit was the best thing that could happen to the world.
Let me, then, ask for a moment what is this German culture—what is this German spirit of which the Emperor's Armies are at present the missionaries in Belgium and France? [Laughter.] Mankind owes much to Germany—a very great debt—for the contributions she has made to philosophy, to science, and to the arts; but, gentlemen, that which is specifically German in the movement of the world in the last thirty years has been, on the intellectual side, the development of the doctrine of the supreme and ultimate prerogative in human affairs of material force, and on the practical side the taking of the foremost place in the fabrication and the multiplication of the machinery of destruction. To the men who have adopted this gospel—who believe as Treitschke and his school do, that power is the be-all and the end-all of the State—naturally a treaty is nothing more than a piece of parchment, and all the old-world talk about the rights of the weak and the obligation of the strong is only so much threadbare and nauseating cant. For one very remarkable feature about this new school of doctrine is, whatever be its intellectual or its ethical merits, that it has turned out as an actual guide to life to be a very purblind philosophy.
German culture and German spirit did not save the Emperor and his people from delusions and miscalculations—as dangerous as they were absurd—in regard to the British Empire. [Cheers.] We were believed by those cultivated observers—[laughter]—to be the decadent descendants of a people who, by a combination of luck and of fraud, had managed to obtain dominion over a vast quantity of the surface and the populations of the globe. This fortuitous aggregation—[laughter]—
