PEACE AND WAR
A Speech to the Citizens of Manchester
Letter to the _Manchester Guardian_
PART II
THE TERRITORIAL FORCE
Introductory Note: The National Service League and the Territorial Force
The Mansion House Speech: Lord Haldane's Scheme Examined
PART III
THE NATIONAL SERVICE LEAGUE AND WORKING MEN
Introductory Note: Mr. Blatchford's Criticism of the Manchester Speech
Letter to the _Times_ on Compulsory Service and the Social Condition of
the Working Classes
PART IV
TERRITORIAL OFFICERS AND THE PRESENT CRISIS
Address at the Annual Dinner of the Kentish Men and the Men of Kent
INTRODUCTION
My recent speech in Manchester has been so widely discussed, and, in
certain quarters, so gravely misrepresented or misunderstood, that, in
the interests of the cause which I there defended, I am impelled to
place before the public a complete text of that speech with such notes
and supplementary matter as seem necessary to make my meaning
unmistakable except to faction or to prejudice.
No one who has followed with attention the efforts of the National
Service League has any right to imagine that we desire a strong army
solely in order to invade the territory of European or more distant
States; or that we wish to root out the Territorial Force in order to
establish in its place an army system modelled on the army system of
Germany; or, again, that we have the ambition of resuscitating once
more medieval blood-lust, anarchic plunder, and delight in war!
What, then, are our aims?
We desire, in the first place, that all patriotic men within this
Empire should be made to see and to feel that from one cause or another
England, by neglecting her armaments, has drifted into a position which
it is impossible to describe otherwise than as a position of danger.
We desire further that all patriotic men should, without either
insincerity or delay, put to themselves the questions: How are we to
arrest that drifting, and how are we to evade or overcome that danger?
And, in the third place, with regard to foreign nations or empires, our
ambition is simply that States well-disposed towards us, whether near
or distant, may have it in their power to mix with their friendliness
respect, and with their goodwill esteem.
In the following pages I have stated in brief the solutions of these
problems which, after some experience of peace and war and after some
deliberation not free from anxiety, I have come to look upon as the
only workable solutions, as the only solutions consonant with our
honour and our continuance as an Empire.
And in view of the discussion and criticism which this speech has
provoked, and still provokes, I may be permitted to add, that, in
whatever I have said in this speech as in other speeches, I have had in
sight but one purpose--the good of this nation and the safety and
greatness of this Empire. It is for my fellow-countrymen to judge
between me and those who, during these past few weeks, have willingly
or unwillingly misinterpreted my purpose or misstated my words. It is
also for my countrymen to decide upon a far mightier issue; for in this
self-governed, free, and democratic State of England it is for all its
citizens to assert whether, in this matter of war and preparedness for
war, they shall face the facts, resolute to see things as they are, or
whether they shall continue indifferent to the history of the past and
obstinately blind to the warnings of the present, even to such beacons
as are now aflame on every hill from the Balkans to the Dardanelles!
And I appeal above all to the young men of this nation, to our young
men of every rank and social status, to the young men of every trade
and profession and calling of any kind; for it is they who, in victory
or in disaster, will have to meet the consequences of this tremendous
decision. It is they, in a word, who now are England.
Young men, young men of British birth, is it possible that you can
shirk the issue, that you can fail to hear, or that, hearing, you can
fail to respond to your country's summons, to the memories of the past,
to the hopes of the future?
LORD ROBERTS' MESSAGE TO THE NATION
PART I
PEACE AND WAR
A SPEECH TO THE CITIZENS OF MANCHESTER,
OCTOBER 25, 1912.
MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN,
This is only the second occasion in a long life on which I have had the
privilege of speaking in your city; and it is with no inadequate sense
of the value of that occasion and of the responsibility attaching to
the position which, for the past ten years, I have taken up towards
this Empire and its armies that I come before you this afternoon. For
in the upbuilding of that Empire what city in our dominions has taken a
more conspicuous part than this city, made illustrious almost since its
foundation by commercial enterprise and by its political sagacity and
spirit in affairs? In the eighteenth century your merchants aided the
designs of the elder Pitt, and of the statesmen who followed him, in
founding that power in India and the East which to-day is the envy and
the admiration of the nations. In the nineteenth, within my own
memory, your city, under the unforgotten leadership of John Bright,
Richard Cobden, and Milner Gibson, gave a great watchword[1] to a great
and still living party, and by its resolute effort forced through
Parliament the repeal of the Corn Laws, one of the most momentous and
revolutionary measures in this nation's history.
Nor, in more recent times, has Manchester abated her zeal or her vital
energy in every phase of English political life. The greatest, most
temperate, and statesmanlike Liberal newspaper in England is night by
night printed within your walls; so that, at least in one phase of our
national life and amongst one group of our fellow-citizens--the Liberal
party, that is to say--it is literally true that what Manchester thinks
to-night London thinks to-morrow. And a certain election the other
day, and the overflow meetings which, I understand, have been held in
favour of Tariff Reform within the sacred precincts of the Free Trade
Hall itself, give a further proof that here in Manchester you are not
petrified in your opinions, but that the stream of your political life
flows fresh and from the fountain-head.
Judge then, gentlemen, whether it was not with some concern that I
looked forward to this occasion; judge whether it was not with some
searching of the heart that I reflected upon what I have this afternoon
to say to you. For does it not appear at first sight as if what I have
to say is not merely antagonistic to the teaching of the two greatest
names of the Manchester School, John Bright and Richard Cobden, but is
in every way the contradiction of the characterizing ideas and the
traditions associated with this city itself?
For I come before you to-day to advocate the necessity of National
Service; to affirm once more that the "Nation in Arms" is the only
worthy and sure bulwark of this Empire and these islands.[2] Cobden,
on the other hand, has left it on record that he considered it the
glory and the exceeding great reward of all his labours that he had
contributed, in however small a degree, to that universal disarmament
of Europe, which, he sanguinely hoped, would be the result of Free
Trade and of expanding commerce and the organization of labour. And
John Bright, his great colleague, in one speech after another, added
the lustre of his eloquence to that same high and flattering
anticipation. I can remember easily the ardent and sympathetic
reception which those anticipations met in the France of Louis
Napoleon; I can remember also the added weight which France's
enthusiasm gave to those happy anticipations here in England. War,
indeed, seemed at an end. To-morrow, it seemed, we should be turning
our barracks into granaries and our arsenals into banking houses.
Gentlemen, I am, I trust, doing no wrong to the memory of these
statesmen when I point out that in the very years--nay, in the very
months--that they were cherishing these illusions of peace and
universal disarmament, in those very months the mightiest and most
disciplined force that this earth has ever contained was silently being
drilled in that wide region from the Rhine to the Elbe and the Oder,
and from the North Sea to the Bavarian frontier, until, the right hour
having struck, that army disclosed itself in all its prodigious and
crushing mass and in all its unmatched capacity for destruction and
war. And, amid those auspicious dreams of peace, for what was that
army being trained? Koeniggrätz, Metz, St. Privat, and Sedan are the
answer. Nor did that army pause until upon the ruins of the Empire of
the third Napoleon--upon the ruins, I may say, of France, unprepared in
peace, and in war scattered and dismayed--it had reared a new Empire,
the Empire of William I., of Frederick I., and of William II., for
whose personal character, noble and imaginative patriotism, and
capacities as a ruler, I yield to no man in my admiration. Such,
gentlemen, was history's ironic comment upon John Bright's and Richard
Cobden's eloquently-urged enthusiasm. Let me not increase by any word
of mine the crushing weight of Destiny's criticism.
Now, gentlemen, at the present day, now in the year 1912, our German
friends, I am well aware, do not, at least in sensible circles, assert
dogmatically that a war with Great Britain will take place this year or
next; but in their heart of hearts they know, every man of them,[3]
that, just as in 1866 and just as in 1870, war will take place the
instant the German forces by land and sea are, by their superiority at
every point, as certain of victory as anything in human calculation can
be made certain. "Germany strikes when Germany's hour has struck."
That is the time-honoured policy of her Foreign Office. That was the
policy relentlessly pursued by Bismarck and Moltke in 1866 and 1870; it
has been her policy decade by decade since that date; it is her policy
at the present hour. And, gentlemen, it is an excellent policy. It
is, or should be, the policy of every nation prepared to play a great
part in history. Under that policy Germany has, within the last ten
years, sprung, as at a bound, from one of the weakest of naval Powers
to the greatest naval Power, save one, upon this globe. But yesterday,
so to speak, the British Fleets did not feel the furrow of a German
war-keel on the wide seas. To-day every British warship and every
British merchant vessel thrills in all her iron nerves to that mighty
presence. Just as in 1866, by the massing of her armies towards this
frontier or towards that frontier, Prussia controlled the action of
Austria, so Germany constrains the action of England at the present
day. Do you wish for proofs? I point to the gradual displacement of
the British Fleet before the German menace. I point to the
Mediterranean, bereft of British battleships, and to the gradual
narrowing, year by year, of our once far-flung battle-line.
We may stand still: Germany always advances, and the direction of her
advance, the line along which she is moving, is now most manifest. It
is towards that consummation which I have described--a complete
supremacy by land and sea. She has built a mighty fleet; but, as if
nothing were done so long as anything stands between her and her goal,
still she presses on--here establishing a new Heligoland, for every
available island in the North Sea has been fortified--there enclosing
Holland in a network of new canals, and deepening old riverbeds for the
swifter transport of the munitions of war, whether to her army or her
fleet.
Contrasted with our own apathy or puerile and spasmodic efforts, how
impressive is this magnificent and unresting energy! It has the mark
of true greatness; it extorts admiration even from those against whom
it is directed!
But, it is urged by the advocates of universal peace, how monstrous is
this expenditure of human strength and human ingenuity, if unused, and
how yet more monstrous the waste of human life if actually used in
war![4] And how much more sane is the policy of Cobden and of Bright
and of their imitators or followers at the present day! Gentlemen,
arguments which prove the folly and criminality of war are, at the
present stage of history, like the arguments which prove the folly and
criminality of ambition and of the love of glory. Even those who argue
most eloquently against glory do, by that very eloquence, seek to win
glory; and those who argue most forcibly against war do, nevertheless,
live, and for long will continue to live, under an invisible power
which has made war an inseparable portion of human polity. Much,
during the autumn of 1911, was said and written upon arbitration.
America's action in the Panama Canal, and the impotence of diplomatists
in the Balkan crisis,[5] are again history's ironic comment in the
autumn of 1912! Arbitration most certainly is more humane than war;
but, at the present stage of the polity of nations, arbitration again
and again refuses to extend itself to some of the most vital and
essential questions--questions which, to a nation or empire sensitive
alike to its honour and to its abiding interests, make war unavoidable.
Again, we have heard much during the current year of the power of
Labour in international politics. The German Socialist, it is said,
will not make war upon his French or his English comrade. Gentlemen,
it is to the credit of the human race that patriotism, in the presence
of such organizations, has always proved itself superior to any class
or any individual. Love of country has on the actual day of battle
always proved itself superior to love of profit. That law has not been
abrogated, and if war broke out to-morrow the German working man would
quit himself like a German, and the British working man, I hope, like a
Briton.
Hence, gentlemen, the mistrust with which I have always viewed the
proposals of British Ministers for a limitation of armaments.
Emanating from Great Britain, such proposals must always, I imagine,
impress a foreign observer as either too early or too late in English
history. For how was this Empire of Britain founded? War founded this
Empire--war and conquest! When we, therefore, masters by war of
one-third of the habitable globe, when we propose to Germany to disarm,
to curtail her navy or diminish her army, Germany naturally refuses;
and pointing, not without justice, to the road by which England, sword
in hand, has climbed to her unmatched eminence, declares openly, or in
the veiled language of diplomacy, that by the same path, if by no
other, Germany is determined also to ascend! Who amongst us, knowing
the past of this nation, and the past of all nations and cities that
have ever added the lustre of their name to human annals, can accuse
Germany or regard the utterance of one of her greatest Chancellors a
year and a half ago,[6] or of General Bernhardi three months ago, with
any feelings except those of respect?
Gentlemen, other world-Powers besides Germany have arisen and are
arising around us; but there is one way in which Britain can have
peace, not only with Germany, but with every other Power, national or
imperial, and that is, to present such a battle-front by sea and land
that no Power or probable combination of Powers shall dare to attack
her without the certainty of disaster. That is the only reply worthy
of our past and wise for our future which we can or ought to make to
those unparalleled efforts which I have described. And there is a way
in which England can have war; there is a way in which she is certain
to have war and its horrors and calamities: it is by persisting in her
present course, her apathy, unintelligence, blindness, and in her
disregard of the warnings of the most ordinary political insight, as
well as of the examples of history.
And what is the lesson which History enforces? Of two courses you must
choose one: you must either abandon your Empire, and with it your
mercantile wealth; or, in the world as it is at present, be prepared to
defend it.
But, you will say, are we so unprepared? Have we not a Fleet? Have we
not an Army?
We have a Fleet, but that Fleet is rapidly becoming unequal to the
fleets by which we may be opposed, and by the inadequacy of our land
forces it is maimed and hampered in its very nature as a Fleet. For
the essence of a Fleet in such an Empire as ours is the utmost
mobility: it must have complete freedom of action. But if, in addition
to its own duties, our Fleet has to perform the role of an army of
defence, what must follow? It becomes a "wooden wall" indeed, unmoving
and inert, anchored around these shores. It is helpless to protect our
food-supplies, without the regular arrival of which we must starve.
A paramount Navy we must possess, whether of two keels to one or three
keels to two. That is a self-evident truth. But if this Empire is to
keep abreast of the rapid and tremendous developments amongst the
world-Powers around us, something more is necessary, and the necessity
increases with every year, almost with every month. It is the
necessity for an Army strong enough to insure the mobility of our Navy,
and strong enough also to make our strength felt on the mainland of
Europe, should we ever appear there as the armed ally of another Power,
as we were on the verge of doing last autumn. That also is, or ought
to be, self-evident.
What, then, is my plan, and what is my ultimate counsel to the nation
and the message to my countrymen that at this solemn hour I would
utter? It is the message burnt into my mind twelve years ago during
the crisis of the South African War; it is the message which every hour
of that protracted and not too glorious struggle made me feel to be
more and more necessary; and, I am compelled to say frankly, it is the
message which events, some quite recent and some remoter, have
compelled me to regard as more pressing in 1912 than in 1900-1901.
Gentlemen, that message is: "Arm and prepare to quit yourselves like
men, for the time of your ordeal is at hand." A long interval has been
allowed us for preparation; for in this era of rapid evolution twelve
years is a big space in human affairs. Twelve years have been given to
us, and in those years what have we done? We have modified and
remodified the effete voluntary system; we have invented several new
names and a new costume. But as regards efficiency and as regards
preparedness for war, we are practically where we were in 1900.[7]
For, so far as the choice between the voluntary system and some form of
National Service is concerned, what have these twelve years
demonstrated, except the futility and positive danger of any and every
other system except some form of compulsion? There has, I say, been
much juggling with words and names. The old Militia and Volunteers
have disappeared, and the Special Reserve and the Territorials have
taken their place; there has been much complimentary and interested or
disinterested laudation by Members of Parliament, and, I regret to say,
by some few officers of the army. The fact remains, that in the
opinion of every impartial soldier with any experience of modern
war--in the opinion, I say, of every soldier, whether British, German,
or French, who has given any attention to the subject, this great
Empire is wholly unprepared for war. As a European Power, as a
Continental Power, we do not exist--for war. Our Army, as a
belligerent factor in European politics, is almost a negligible
quantity. This great Empire, indeed--and the more we exalt its
greatness and its unrivalled character, the more astounding does our
recklessness appear--this great Empire is at all times practically
defenceless beyond its first line. Such an Empire invites war. Its
assumed security amid the armaments of Europe, and now of Asia, is
insolent and provocative.
For remember that war does not begin, nor does it end, on the day of
battle. There is a kind of war which goes on silent and unperceived
amid apparent peace. That is the war which undermines commerce, which
profoundly affects a city like your city. If once you permit any one
State to be your undisputed superior by sea and land, that hour, even
if not a shot be fired, you cease to be a free nation. You are no
longer an Empire. Your commercial greatness is vanished. You hold
your very lives by the sufferance of another, and would have to submit
to any terms he might dictate.
Such, gentlemen, is the origin, and such the considerations which have
fostered in me the growth of this conviction--the conviction that in
some form of National Service is the only salvation of this nation and
this Empire. The Territorial Force is now an acknowledged failure--a
failure in discipline, a failure in numbers, a failure in equipment, a
failure in energy.[8] I have so often demonstrated this thesis; I have
so often analyzed the contradictions[9] in the arguments of the
supporters of the Territorial movement; I have so often exposed their
vamped-up statistics, and the rewards and encouragement offered by
politicians to every soldier or civilian willing to say a word in
praise of that scheme--I have done all this so often that there seems
nothing left for me to say. To you, as practical business men, I will
merely repeat this one statement--a statement the truth of which is
known to every experienced soldier--that so long as the Territorial
Force is based on voluntary enlistment, it is impossible to give its
members a sufficiently lengthy and continuous period of training to
insure a discipline which will stand the severe test of modern war. In
saying this, I am making no aspersions against the zeal or intelligence
of the patriotic men who compose the Force; neither they nor their
employers can afford the necessary time, so long as all men in this
country are not treated alike, and all compelled to serve their
apprenticeship in the National Forces.[10] And, unless I am
misinformed, the majority of the Territorials are now in favour of
compulsion.
Gentlemen, only the other day I completed my eightieth year, and to
some of you, doubtless to many of you, I am indebted for one of the
moments of the deepest gratification in my life, and the words I am
speaking to-day are, therefore, old words--the result of earnest
thought and practical experience; but, gentlemen, my fellow-citizens
and fellow-Englishmen, citizens of this great and sacred trust, this
Empire, if these were my last and latest words, I still should say to
you, "Arm yourselves!" And if I put to myself the question, How can I,
even at this late and solemn hour, best help England?--England that to
me has been so much, England that for me has done so much--again I
answer, "Arm and prepare to quit yourselves like men, for the day of
your ordeal is at hand." I have commanded your armies in peace and in
war. In my early years, as in my middle life, and now in these my
latest years, I have felt to the quick the glories accompanying the
armies of the past across every battlefield. What made the valour of
those armies so distinguished? One thing at least: it was that, in
officers exclusively, and in the ranks mainly, they were composed of
men who regarded citizenship as incomplete unless it involved
soldiership. Gentlemen, you have been enfranchised, many of you, by
the great Acts of 1832 and 1867. I say to you, the young men of this
city and of this nation, that your enfranchisement is not complete
until you have become soldiers as well as citizens, prepared to attest
your manhood on the battlefield as well as at the election booths.
Much has been said recently of the rights and the power of the workers
of this nation. We all, I hope, belong to that class--workers--but the
artisan class of the nation has been urged--and to you, the working men
of Manchester, I now specially address myself--you have been urged, I
say, to refuse to do your duties in war until your rights in peace are
granted. Gentlemen, I say to you, that is not the policy either of
Britishers or of men. I will go further: I say to you that it is not
by declining or shirking duty that you will extend your rights. He who
diminishes the power and vital resources of Great Britain diminishes
the power and the vital resources of every Britisher. How can you most
easily and most securely better yourselves as Britishers--as working
men? By making England better, by making it better worth your while to
be a citizen of, and a worker in that nation! If you seized by
violence or by Act of Parliament all the accumulated capital of the
centuries, you might have a madman's holiday for a time; but in the end
you would emerge bankrupt and starving. You yourselves are the capital
of the nation--the life-wealth of the nation--its manhood. Weapons,
however perfect, will not make an army. Men are necessary--men of
spirit, men of energy, loving their country, not merely loving their
class or themselves. And on you, in turn, that discipline and those
duties will confer unreckonable benefits. A tyranny imposes an
exterior restraint; but you, in your free democratic constitution,
should consider it as your privilege to impose upon yourselves from
within that discipline and those sacred duties.
I say to you, therefore, assert your rights as Britishers by demanding
the greatest, the highest of all civic and of all national rights--the
right to be taught to defend your country--the right, that is, to
defend your own honour as Britons and your liberties as citizens of
this Empire. Thus, and thus only, shall you be worthy of that Empire's
great past and of the dignity which that past confers upon every man of
you, whatever your position in life may be.
[1] Apart from Free Trade and unrestrained competition, there are three
other doctrines, or political principles, associated with the
Manchester School: (1) To maintain peace at any cost; (2) strictly to
avoid all interference with the internal affairs of foreign Powers; (3)
to subordinate as far as possible all other interests to the interests
of industry. The complete organization of industry was to have, as its
immediate consequence, the abolition of war. These principles
crystallized later into the familiar watchword of Liberalism: "Peace,
Retrenchment, and Reform."
[2] Succinctly, by "the Nation in Arms" I mean that every able-bodied
citizen has patriotism enough to take his place in the firing-line to
repel invasion; and, secondly, that he has common sense enough to
undergo the discipline to make that self-sacrifice effective. In the
second part of this book I have indicated what that preparation means.
Here I may only observe that when Lord Haldane speaks of "the whole
nation springing to arms at the call of duty" he is once more
forgetting the part which discipline plays in modern war. A nation may
"spring to arms," but if it is not disciplined, and thoroughly
disciplined, its very courage will only serve to hasten its
destruction. Within the last few weeks tens of thousands of brave
Ottomans have sprung to arms, but with what dire results!
[3] It would be easy, I am informed on good authority, to illustrate
this from passages in the works of German writers from Treitschke, the
great exponent of Bismarckism, to writers of the present day. And I
may quote a paragraph in support of my thesis from an unexpected
source, that of Mr. H. M. Hyndman, in a letter to the _Morning Post_ of
November 9, nearly three weeks after my Manchester speech. Mr.
Hyndman, I need not remind my readers, not only enjoys a wide
experience of German Socialism, but of many phases of German politics
and political life. He writes: "I cannot for the life of me understand
what Sir Edward Grey hopes to gain by rebuking Lord Roberts for stating
that which the whole Continent knows perfectly well to be the truth.
The German Fleet is being strengthened now, as it has been increased up
to the present time, in order either to attack us in the North Sea,
when the German Government thinks it safe to do so; or, by threats of
what will occur, to force us to accept German policy, and allow the
German Empire to do what it pleases with Holland, Belgium, Denmark, and
Switzerland, after having crushed or arranged with France. If Germany
is not hostile to this country, why does the whole Pan-German party
(and Press), to which the heir to the German throne openly belongs,
declare that she is? Why is it that 'England is the enemy' is the
common talk all through German middle-class circles? Or, on the other
hand, if the relations between the two nations are so excellent as our
Foreign Minister assures us they are--thus leading many sober Frenchmen
to believe that our _entente_ with France only means that we shall
betray the French Republic the moment it suits us to do so--why are we
fortifying Rosyth as a naval base, why have we withdrawn our Fleet from
the Mediterranean to concentrate it in home waters, and why was every
journal in this country discussing the issues of peace and war with the
German Empire when the late German Ambassador came to this country?
More important still, why have we given way to a worse Government than
that of Germany--the Russian Government, to wit--on matters of the
first importance in Persia and elsewhere? Are the English people mere
children thus to be fed on the pap of fatuous pacificism and convenient
party misrepresentation at one of the most serious crises in the
history of our race?"
[4] It is, or ought to be, superfluous to rebut the frantic accusation
brought against myself and the National Service League by a leading
Liberal weekly on October 26--that of blood-lust. Can there be
Englishmen--or men bearing English names--in whom all sense of personal
honour is so decayed, that to resent a national affront or to defend
their Fatherland from foreign aggression appears a duty from which they
recoil in shuddering apprehension?
[5] Since these words were spoken, with what an unparalleled rapidity
has event crowded upon portentous event in the Near East! I have no
wish to establish hasty analogies or to draw premature inferences; but
what Englishman can consider the events of these past three weeks and
remember without a pitying smile Lord Haldane's naïve assurance that
with six months' training our Territorials would be ready for war! Did
ever dilettantism so give itself away?
[6] In March, 1911, when every pulpit and every newspaper, under the
influence of President Taft's message, promised us within a brief
period universal peace and disarmament, the German Chancellor, Herr
Bethmann-Hollweg, had the courage and the common sense to stand apart,
and, speaking for his Emperor and his nation, to lay it down as a maxim
that, at the present stage of the world's history, the armed forces of
any nation or empire must have a distinct relation to the material
resources of that nation or empire. This position seems to me as
statesmanlike as it is unanswerable; but in applying the principle to
our own country, I should be inclined to modify it by saying that the
armed forces of any nation or empire ought to represent, not only its
material resources, but the spirit which animates that nation or
empire--in a word, that its armed forces should be the measure of the
nation's devotion to whatever ends it pursues.
[7] For a more complete examination of this subject, I must refer the
reader to the First Part of "Fallacies and Facts," published two years
ago in answer to Lord Haldane's and Sir Ian Hamilton's "Compulsory
Service."
[8] Since these words were spoken a remarkable series of letters in the
_Daily Mail_, emanating from every grade in the Territorial Army
itself, has illustrated and demonstrated this position point by point.
[9] See, for example, my speech at the Mansion House, which forms the
second part of the present publication.
[10] As an illustration, let me quote a letter which I received from an
important firm of manufacturing chemists in reply to a request from the
Secretary of the National Service League to be allowed to speak to
their men on the subject of Universal Military Training: "We regret
that our manager at Hounslow is not in favour of your going there, for
fear Territorial enlistment may be encouraged. Our business is of a
peculiar nature, and is already quite seriously interfered with by the
training of the appreciable number of Territorials in our employ. The
difficulty is that ours is very skilled labour; in many cases we have
no duplicate men, and outsiders cannot temporarily take up and
discharge the duties of these men. When service is compulsory we shall
be on equal terms with everybody else, and willing to bear an increased
burden."
ADDITIONAL NOTE
ENGLEMERE, ASCOT, BERKS.
November 5, 1912.
To THE EDITOR OF THE "MANCHESTER GUARDIAN."
Sir,
My attention has been drawn to the leader in your issue of the 4th
instant, in which you deal with a passage in my speech in Manchester.
I am too much accustomed to adverse criticism in my efforts to arouse
the nation to a sense of its unpreparedness for war to resent in any
way the attacks of my opponents. But when a paper of such standing as
that of the _Manchester Guardian_ completely misconstrues what was
certainly a salient passage in my speech, I feel bound, in justice to
the cause which I have at heart, to explain my meaning more fully than
was possible when I was dealing with the whole question of National
Defence in relation to our position as a world-Power.
It is true that I pointed out the striking process by which Germany has
developed from a loose congeries of petty federated States to the
united Empire which arouses the admiration of the world to-day. Before
1866 the German States, under the scarcely-established leadership of
Prussia, were surrounded on every side by jealous rivals or hostile
neighbours, and it seemed doubtful whether the unity which was the
dream of Stein in 1806, and of the Revolutionists in 1848, could ever
be attained, except by a policy of blood and iron. Certain it is that
Bismarck, the architect of united Germany, saw in the policy of
successful war the only means of realizing German nationality, and of
constructing the edifice of national greatness so firmly that it should
stand "foursquare to all the winds that blow." The three hammer
strokes of 1864, 1866, and 1870, were needed to achieve this result,
but the strength and precision of those hammer blows were prepared by
long years of patient, self-sacrificing labour, during which the German
forces were made "as certain of victory as anything in human
calculation can be made certain, by their superiority at every point."
Of this process and development, inspiring the whole nation to manful
effort and to individual sacrifice for the common fatherland, even if
it be in preparation for death or victory on the battlefield, I said
that "it is an excellent policy. It is, or should be, the policy of
every nation prepared to play a great part in history." And I repeat
that statement to-day, when the glorious achievements of the younger
Nations in Arms have lent point to its truth, while they have
established their claims to nationhood and the gratitude of hundreds of
thousands of their kinsmen.
But to suggest that I am urging upon England that it should be her
policy, first, to arm herself better than Germany, and then to make war
on Germany, with or without a just cause, with or without even a
quarrel, simply because England thinks herself at that moment able to
win a war--this is a suggestion so strange and so repugnant to my mind
that I am utterly at a loss to understand how it could be attributed to
me, or elicited from my speech. A moment's reflection will show the
vast difference between the position of Germany, with which I was
dealing, and that of England to-day. While Germany, owing to her
rapidly expanding population and vast economic development, is impelled
to look for means of expansion in a world which is already for the most
part parcelled out, we, on the other hand, do not require or seek
another square mile of dominion. Our object must be to develop the
resources of our Empire, commercially, industrially, and socially. But
in order to be able to do so we must be in a position to defend
ourselves successfully against aggression, and so to remove the
temptation which a wealthy but ill-defended Empire must always offer to
a strong and virile people, proud of its achievements and conscious of
its fitness to fill a greater place amid the nations. My whole speech
was directed, therefore--as are all my efforts--to impressing upon my
fellow-countrymen the terrible danger which is involved in the present
situation, in which we alone find ourselves, as a nation, untrained,
unorganized, and unarmed, amid a Europe in which every people, not only
great Powers like Russia, Germany, and France, but the smaller
States--Bulgaria, Servia, Greece, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark--stand as
armed nations, providing a balance of forces which, while it
strengthens each one of them physically and industrially, makes for
peace with honour--or for the triumph of the right.
Yours very truly,
ROBERTS, F.M.