and her Navy by the aggressive military bureaucracy of Berlin?
To their eternal honour his Majesty's Government would not agree to this shameful proposal, and in their action they had the unswerving support of every member of the Unionist Party. [Cheers.] The thorough justification of the struggle in which we are engaged is that we are fighting for the very existence of international law, which has wrested a precious fragment of humanity from the cruel savagery of war. We are fighting to maintain the prescriptive claim of civilization to assert the sanctity of the plighted word and to assign limits to a barbarous and irrational system. This war is going to end either when we break that system or when it breaks us.
The terms of peace will be arranged either in London or Berlin, and on the whole I think they will be arranged in Berlin. [Cheers.] Finding ourselves engaged in this war on a voluntary basis, without having made any inquiry into the advantages or disadvantages of universal military service, I hope that we shall go through the war as a volunteer nation, and so afford our German critics the extreme proof of our national decadence—[laughter]—and convince the world that a proud nation may ardently love peace and yet be fit for war. [Cheers.]
