Speech in the Round Room of the Mansion House, Sept. 25.
My Lord Mayor: Some weeks ago I took it upon myself to suggest to the
four principal Magistrates of the United Kingdom that they should afford
me an opportunity of making a personal appeal to their citizens at a
great moment in our national history. I have already delivered my
message in London and in Edinburgh. To the first of those great
communities I was able to speak as an Englishman by birth and as a
Londoner by early association and long residence. To the second, the
capital of the ancient Kingdom of Scotland, I had special credentials as
having been for the best part of thirty years one of their
representatives in the House of Commons, ["Hear, hear!"] and now,
indeed, by one of the melancholy privileges of time the senior among the
Scottish members. [Laughter.] But, my Lord Mayor, tonight when I come to
Dublin I can put forward neither the one claim nor the other. [A
Voice--Home Rule.] I base my title, such as it is, to your hospitality
and your hearing upon such service as during the whole of my political
life I have tried with a whole heart and to the best of my faculties and
opportunities to render to Ireland. [Cheers.] I come here, not as a
partisan, not even as a politician, but I come here as for the time
being the head of the King's Government, [cheers,] to summon Ireland, a
loyal and patriotic Ireland, to take her place in the defense of our
common cause. [Cheers.] My Lord Mayor, it is no part of my mission
tonight, it is indeed at this time of day wholly unnecessary, to
justify, still less to excuse, the part which the Government of the
United Kingdom has taken in this supreme crisis in our national
affairs. There have been wars in the past in regard to which there has
been among us diversity of opinion, uneasiness as to the wisdom of our
diplomacy, anxiety as to the expediency of our policy, doubts as to the
essential righteousness of our cause.
Unity of the Empire.
That, my Lord Mayor, as you said, is not the case today. [Cheers.] Even
in the memorable struggle which we waged a hundred years ago against the
domination of Napoleon there was always a minority, respectable not
merely in number, but in the sincerity and in the eminence of its
adherents, which broke the front of our national unity. Again I say that
is not the case today. We feel as a nation--or rather I ought to say,
speaking here and looking round upon our vast empire in every quarter of
the globe--as a family of nations, [prolonged cheers,] without
distinction of creed or party, of race or climate, class or section,
that we are united in defending principles and in maintaining interests
which are vital, not only to the British Empire, but to all that is
worth having in our common civilization, [cheers,] and all that is worth
hoping for in the future progress of mankind. [Loud cheers.] What better
or higher cause, my Lord Mayor, whether we succeed or fail? [Cries of
"No failure."] We are going not to fail, but to succeed. [Enthusiastic
cheers.] What higher cause than to arouse and enlist the best qualities
of a free people, than to be engaged at one and the same time in the
vindication of international good faith, in the protection of the weak
against the violence of the strong, [cheers,] and in the assertion of
the best ideals of all the free communities in all the ages of time and
in every part of the world against the encroachments of those who
believe and who preach and who practice the religion of force? It is
not--I am sure you will agree with me--it is not necessary to
demonstrate once more that of this war Germany is the real and the
responsible author. [Cheers.] The proofs are patent, manifold and
overwhelming. [Cheers.] Indeed, on the part of Germany herself we get
upon this point, if denial at all, a denial only of the faintest and the
most formal kind. For a generation past she has been preparing the
ground, equipping herself, both by land and sea, fortifying herself with
alliances, and, what is perhaps even more important, teaching her youth
to seek and to pursue as the first and the most important of all human
things the supremacy of the German power and the German spirit, and all
that time biding her opportunity. Gentlemen, many of the great wars of
history have been almost accidentally brought about by the blindness of
blundering statesmen, or by some wave of popular passion. That is not so
today. ["Hear, hear!"] There was nothing in a quarrel such as this
between Austria and Servia that could not have been and that would not
have been settled by pacific means. [Cheers.]
Germany's Profound Mistakes.
But in the judgment of those who guide and control German policy the
hour had come to strike the blow that had been long and deliberately
prepared. In their hands lay the choice between peace and war, and their
election was for war. In so deciding, as everybody now knows, Germany
made two profound miscalculations. [Cheers.] Both of them natural enough
in a man who had come to believe that in international matters
everything can be explained and measured in terms of material force.
What, gentlemen, were those mistakes? The first was that Belgium,
[cheers,] a small and prosperous country entirely disinterested in
European quarrels, guaranteed by the joint and several compacts of the
great powers, that Belgium would not resent, and certainly would not
resist, the use of her territory as a highroad for an invading German
force into France. How could they imagine that this little country,
rather than allow her neutrality to be violated and her independence
insulted and menaced, was prepared that her fields should be drenched
with the blood of her soldiers, her towns and villages devastated by
marauders, her splendid heritage of monuments and of treasures, built up
for her by the piety, art, and learning of the past, ruthlessly laid in
ruins? The passionate attachment of a numerically small population to
the bit of territory, which looks so little upon the map, the pride and
the unconquerable devotion of a free people to their own free State,
these were things which apparently had never been dreamed of in the
philosophy of Potsdam. [Laughter and "Hear, hear!"] Rarely in history
has there been a greater material disparity between the invaders and the
invaded, but the moral disparity was at least equally great. [Cheers.]
For, gentlemen, the indomitable resistance of the Belgians did more than
change the whole face of the campaign. [Cheers.] It proved to the world
that ideas which cannot be weighed or measured by any material calculus
can still inspire and dominate mankind. [Cheers.] And that is the reason
why the whole sympathy of the civilized world at this moment is going
out to these small States--Belgium, Servia, and Montenegro--that have
played so worthy a part in this historic struggle. [Cheers.]
The Moral Bond of Civilization.
But, my Lord Mayor, Germany was guilty of another and a still more
capital blunder in relation to ourselves. ["Hear, hear!"] I am not
referring for the moment to the grotesque understanding upon which I
dwelt a week ago at Edinburgh, their carefully fostered belief that we
here were so rent with civil distraction, [laughter,] so paralyzed by
luke-warmness or disaffection in our dominions and dependencies, that if
it came to fighting we might be brushed aside as an impotent and even a
negligible factor. [Cheers and cries of "Never!"] The German
misconception went even deeper than that. They asked themselves what
interest, direct or material, had the United Kingdom in this conflict?
Could any nation, least of all the cold, calculating, phlegmatic,
egotistic British nation, [laughter,] embark upon a costly and bloody
contest from which it had nothing in the hope of profit to expect?
["Hear, hear!"] They forgot--they forgot that we, like the Belgians, had
something at stake which cannot be translated into what one of our
poets has called "The law of nicely calculated less or more." What was
it we had at stake? First and foremost, the fulfillment to the small and
relatively weak country of our plighted word [cheers] and behind and
beyond that the maintenance of the whole system of international
good-will which is the moral bond of the civilized world. [Cheers.] Here
again they were wrong in thinking that the reign of ideas, Old World
ideas like those of duty and good faith, had been superseded by the
ascendency of force. My Lord Mayor, war is at all times a hideous thing;
at the best an evil to be chosen in preference to worse evils, and at
the worst little better than the letting loose of hell upon earth. The
prophet of old spoke of the "confused noise of battle and the garments
rolled in blood," but in these modern days, with the gigantic scale of
the opposing armies and the scientific developments of the instruments
of destruction, war has become an infinitely more devastating thing than
it ever was before. The hope that the general recognition of a humaner
code would soften or abate some of its worst brutalities has been rudely
dispelled by the events of the last few weeks. ["Shame!"]
Shameful and Cynical Desecration.
The German invasion of Belgium and France contributes, indeed, some of
the blackest pages to its sombre annals. Rarely has a non-combatant
population suffered more severely, and rarely, if ever, have the
monuments of piety and of learning and those sentiments of religion and
national association, of which they are the permanent embodiment, even
in the worst times of the most ruthless warriors, been so shamefully and
cynically desecrated; and behind the actual theatre of conflict with its
smoke and its carnage there are the sufferings of those who are left
behind, the waste of wealth, the economic dislocation, the heritage, the
long heritage of enmities and misunderstanding which war brings in its
train. Why do I dwell upon these things? It is to say this, that great
indeed is the responsibility of those who allow their country--as we
have done--to be drawn into such a welter; but there is one thing much
worse than to take such a responsibility, and that is, upon a fitting
occasion, to shirk it. [Cheers.] Our record in the matter is clear. We
strove up to the last moment for peace [cheers] and only when we were
satisfied that the price of peace was the betrayal of other countries
and the dishonor and degradation of our own we took up the sword.
[Prolonged cheers.] I should like, if I might for a moment, beyond this
inquiry into causes and motives, to ask your attention and that of my
fellow-countrymen to the end which in this war we ought to keep in view.
Forty-four years ago, at the time of the war of 1870, Mr. Gladstone used
these words. He said: "The greatest triumph of our time will be the
enthronement of the idea of public right as the governing idea of
European politics." Nearly fifty years have passed. Little progress, it
seems, has yet been made toward that good and beneficent change, but it
seems to me to be now at this moment as good a definition as we can have
of our European policy. The idea of public right; what does it mean when
translated into concrete terms? It means, first and foremost, the
clearing of the ground by the definite repudiation of militarism as the
governing factor in the relation of States, and of the future molding of
the European world. It means, next, that room must be found and kept for
the independent existence and the free development of the smaller
nationalities, [cheers,] each with a corporate consciousness of its own.
The Recognition of Nationality.
Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries,
Greece, and the Balkan States, they must be recognized as having exactly
as good a title as their more powerful neighbors--more powerful in
strength and in wealth--exactly as good a title to a place in the sun.
[Prolonged cheers and some laughter.] And it means, finally, or it ought
to mean, perhaps by a slow and gradual process, the substitution for
force, for the clash of competing ambition, for grouping and alliances
and a precarious equipoise, the substitution for all these things of a
real European partnership, based on the recognition of equal right and
established and enforced by a common will. [Cheers.] A year ago that
would have sounded like a Utopian idea. It is probably one that may not
or will not be realized either today or tomorrow. If and when this war
is decided in favor of the Allies, it will at once come within the
range, and, before long, within the grasp of European statesmanship.
[Cheers.] I go back for a moment, if I am not keeping you too long, ["Go
on,"] to the peculiar aspects of the actual case upon which I have
dwelt, because it seems to me that they ought to make a special appeal
to the people of Ireland. Ireland is a loyal country, [cheers,] and she
would, I know, respond with alacrity to any summons which called upon
her to take her share in the assertion and the defense of our common
interests. But, gentlemen, the issues raised by this war are of such a
kind that, unless I mistake her people and misrepresent her history,
they touch a vibrating chord both in her imagination and in her
conscience. How can you Irishmen be deaf to the cry of the smaller
nationalities to help them in their struggle for freedom [cheers]
whether, as in the case of Belgium, in maintaining what she has won, or
as in the case of Poland or the Balkan States in regaining what they
have lost or in acquiring and putting upon a stable foundation what has
never been fully theirs?
The Appeal to Ireland.
How again can you Irishmen--if I understand you--sit by in cool
detachment and with folded arms while we, in company of our gallant
allies of France and Russia, are opposing a worldwide resistance to
pretensions which threaten to paralyze and sterilize all progress and
the best destinies of mankind? [Cheers.] During the last few weeks Sir
John French and his heroic forces have worthily sustained our cause. The
casualties have been heavy. Ireland has had her share, although they
have been increased during the last week from the ranks of our gallant
navy by one of the hazards of warfare at sea. But of those who have
fallen in both services we may ask how could men die better? [Cheers.]
The Indian Contingent.
They have left behind them an example and an appeal. From all quarters
of the empire its best manhood is flowing in. The first Indian
contingent is, I believe, landing today at Marseilles, [loud cheers,]
and in all parts of our great dominions the convoys are already
mustering. Over half a million recruits have joined the colors here at
home, [cheers,] and I come to ask you in Ireland, though you don't need
my asking, to take your part. [Cheers and shouts of "We must."] There
was a time when, through the operations of laws which every one now
acknowledges to have been both unjust and impolitic, ["Hear, hear!"] the
martial spirit of and the capacity for which Irishmen have always been
conspicuous, found its chief outlet in the alien armies of the
Continent. I have seen it computed--I do not know whether with precise
accuracy--but I have seen it computed upon good authority that in the
first fifty years of the eighteenth century, when the penal laws were
here in full swing, nearly half a million Irishmen enlisted under the
banners of the empire of France and Spain, and we at home in the United
Kingdom suffered a double loss; for, gentlemen, not only were we drained
year by year of some of our best fighting material, ["Hear, hear!"] but
over and over again we found ourselves engaged in battle array suffering
and inflicting deadly loss upon those who might have been, and under
happier conditions would have been, fellow-soldiers of our own.
[Cheers.] The British Empire has always been proud, and with reason, of
those Irish regiments [cheers] and their Irish leaders, [more cheers,]
and was never prouder of them that it is today. [Great cheering.] We ask
you here in Ireland to give us more, [cheers, and a Voice, "You'll get
them,"] to give them without stinting. We ask Ireland to give of her
sons, the most in number, the best in quality that a proud and loyal
daughter of the empire ought to devote to the common cause. [Cheers.]
The Volunteers of Ireland.
The conditions seem to me to be exceptionally favorable for the purpose.
We have of late been witnessing here in Ireland a spontaneous enrollment
and organization in all parts of the country of bodies of volunteers. I
say nothing--for I wish tonight to avoid trespassing upon even a square
inch of controversial ground--I say nothing of the causes or motives
which brought them originally into existence, [laughter,] and have
fostered their growth and strength. I will only say--and this is my
nearest approach to politics tonight--that there are two things which to
my mind have become unthinkable. The first is that one section of
Irishmen are going to fight. [Loud cheers.] The second is that Great
Britain is going to fight either. [Renewed cheers.] Speaking here in
Dublin, I may perhaps address myself for a moment particularly to the
National Volunteers, and I am going to ask them all over Ireland--not
only them, but I make the appeal to them particularly--to contribute
with promptitude and enthusiasm a large and worthy contingent of
recruits to the second new army of half a million, which is growing up
as it were out of the ground. [Cheers.] I should like to see, and we all
want to see, an Irish brigade, [cheers,] or, better still, an Irish army
corps. [Loud cheers.] Do not let them be afraid that by joining the
colors they will lose their identity and become absorbed in some
invertebrate mass, or, what is perhaps equally repugnant, be
artificially redistributed in units which have no national cohesion or
character. We wish to the utmost limit that military exigencies will
allow that men who have been already associated in this or that district
in training and in common exercises should be kept together and continue
to recognize the corporate bond which now unites them. ["Hear, hear!"]
And of one thing further I am sure. We are in urgent need of competent
officers, and we think that if the officers now engaged in training
these men are proved equal to the test, there is no fear that their
services will not be gladly and gratefully retained. I repeat that the
empire needs recruits, and needs them at once, that they may be fully
trained and equipped in time to take their part in what may well be the
decisive fields of the greatest struggle in the history of the world.
That is our immediate necessity, and no Irishman in responding to it
need be afraid that he is prejudicing the future of the volunteers.
[Cheers.] I do not say, and I can not say, under what precise form or
organization, but I trust and believe, and indeed I am certain, that the
volunteers will become a permanent part, an integral and a
characteristic part, of the defensive forces of the Crown. [Cheers.] I
have only one more thing to say to you. [Cries of "Go on."] If our need
is great your opportunity is also great. [Cheers.] The call which I am
making is, as you know well, backed by the sympathy of your
fellow-Irishmen in all parts of the empire and the world. Old
animosities between us are dead. [Loud and prolonged cheers.] Scattered
like the Autumn leaves to the four winds of heaven, we are a united
nation, [renewed cheers,] owing and paying to our sovereign the
heartfelt allegiance of men who at home not only love but enjoy for
themselves the liberty which our soldiers and our sailors are fighting
by land and by sea to maintain and to extend for others. There is no
question of compulsion or bribery. What we want we believe you are ready
and eager to give as the free-will offering of a free people. [Great
cheering.]
The Earl of Meath, Lord Lieutenant of County Dublin, who was next called
on, declared that their gathering would be historic because for the
first time in her history Irishmen of all classes, creeds, and politics
had met on the same platform. The modern Attila might be known, as his
predecessor was known, as the scourge of God. But for the constant
vigilance of our army and our fleet Ireland might have met the fate of
Belgium. He suggested that Earl Kitchener should, as far as possible,
see that the Irish corps at the front should act together.
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