ing as truly as Belgium or France, where the tide of battle with all its horrors is rolling on, for our life. As Cromwell said to his Ironsides, we can say to-day with equal truth, "We know what we are fighting for, and we love what we know." [Cheers.] We are fighting for our national existence, for everything which nations have always held most dear.
But we are fighting for something more. We are fighting for the moral forces of humanity. We are fighting for the respect for public law and for the right of public justice, which are the foundations of civilization. We are fighting, as the Prime Minister said, for right against might. [Cheers.] I do not attempt what Burke has declared to be impossible—to draw an indictment against a whole people; but this I say, that the German nation has allowed itself to be organized as a military machine which recognizes no law except the law of force, which knows no right except the right of the strongest. It is against that we are fighting to-day.
The spirit in which this war was entered into was shown clearly in the words which were addressed to our Ambassador at Berlin by the German Chancellor. "You are going to war," he said, "for a scrap of paper." A scrap of paper, yes, but a scrap of paper with which was bound up a solemn obligation, and with that obligation the honour of a great nation. [Cheers.] A scrap of paper in which was involved also the right to independence and liberty, the right even to existence, of all the small nations of the world. It is for that scrap of paper that Belgian soldiers have fought and died, that the Belgian people, by what they have done and what they have endured, have won for themselves immortal fame. [Cheers.] It is for that scrap of paper and all that it means that we too have already watered with the blood of our sons the fair fields of France, and for it we shall conquer or perish. [Cheers.]
The words which I have quoted show not merely the spirit in which the war was entered into, but the spirit in which it is being conducted to-day. When reports first reached us of German atrocities in Belgium I hoped, for the sake of our common humanity, that they were untrue or at least exaggerated. We can entertain that hope no longer. The destruction of Louvain, to which the Prime Minister has referred, has proclaimed to the world in trumpet tones what German methods are. It has fixed upon German honour an indelible stain, and the explanations which it has been attempted to give of it have only made that stain the deeper. War at the best is
