My thoughts in these days are never very long away from the War, so that I should feel it difficult to speak of anything else.  Yet there are so many ways in which it would be unprofitable for me to pretend to speak of it, that the difficulty remains.  I have no knowledge of military or naval strategy.  I am not intimately acquainted with Germany or with German culture.  I could praise our own people, and our own fighting men, from a full heart; but that, I think, is not exactly what you want from me.  So I am reduced to attempting what we have all had to attempt during the past two years or more, to try to state, for myself as much as for you, the meaning of this War so far as we can perceive it.

It seems to be a decree of fate that this country shall be compelled every hundred years to fight for her very life.  We live in an island that lies across the mouths of the Rhine, and guards the access to all the ports of northern Europe.  In this island we have had enough safety and enough leisure to develop for ourselves a system of constitutional and individual liberty which has had an enormous influence on other nations.  It has been admired and imitated; it has also been hated and attacked.  To the majority of European statesmen and politicians it has been merely unintelligible.  Some of them have regarded it with a kind of superstitious reverence; for we have been very successful in the world at large, and how could so foolish and ineffective a system achieve success except by adventitious aid?  Others, including all the statesmen and political theorists who prepared Germany for this War, have refused to admire; the power of England, they have taught, is not real power; she has been crafty and lucky; she has kept herself free from the entanglements and strifes of the Continent, and has enriched herself by filching the property of the combatants.  If once she were compelled to hold by force what she won by guile, her pretensions would collapse, and she would fall back into her natural position as a small agricultural island, inhabited by a people whose proudest boast would then be that they are poor cousins of the Germans.

It is difficult to discuss this question with German professors and politicians:  they have such simple minds, and they talk like angry children.  Their opinions concerning England are not original; their views were held with equal fervour and expressed in very similar language by Philip of Spain in the sixteenth century, by Louis XIV of France in the seventeenth century, and by Napoleon at the close of the eighteenth century.  ’These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off.’  I will ask you to consider the attack made upon England by each of these three powerful rulers.