the Government, myself included—had done a little more to awaken our people to the danger that was threatening, and to prepare them for the responsibilities which they have now to discharge. But although I knew enough to disquiet me, and enough to make me blame myself now for the measure of silence that I preserved, I did not know of everything. [A Voice: "Lord Roberts."] Yes, all honour to Lord Roberts. I did not know, as the Prime Minister revealed to us at Cardiff last autumn, that the Government had actually offered to the Government of Germany an assurance that nothing in any agreement we had signed pledged us to hostile action against them, and at the same time offered to enter into an agreement that we would never join in an aggressive war against them, and that the German Government rejected that offer as worthless because we would not promise to stand aside whatever quarrel they chose to pick with whatever nation.
They asked us—bear these words in mind—they asked us, said the Prime Minister, to put it quite plainly—for a free hand so far as we were concerned, if they selected the opportunity "to overbear and to dominate the European world." And yet, not very long ago, I saw another distinguished Minister offer an explanation of the war which, for a gentleman who prides himself on clear thinking, I can only describe as puerile. He said that he once had—I think it was—a collie dog, a most charming and delightful animal; but one day it worried twelve sheep. In fact, it had gone mad, and that was what happened to Germany. That is not clear thinking; it is not philosophy; it is not statesmanship; it is pure nonsense, and mischievous nonsense at that. [Applause.]
This struggle is not the affair of a moment; this war is not the outcome of a sudden fit of passion. It was prepared and premeditated, but all the consequences of it were not rightly calculated—the moral forces provoked by the disregard of solemn obligations, of treaty pledges, of the obligations of international law, of relations that ought to prevail between neighbouring states, and the moral indignation and moral effect of such disregard.
But the war was not the accident of a moment. It was a thing planned, prepared for, taught to the German people as inevitable, and to which the whole organizing powers of the German Government had been devoted for a generation. No man can understand the task we have before us; no man can judge the efforts that we may be called upon to make, who
