The diplomatic history of those critical weeks--the
last fortnight in July and the first few days of August--is now
accessible to all the world. It has been supplemented during the last
few days by the admirable and exhaustive dispatch of our late Ambassador
at Vienna, Sir Maurice de Bunsen, a dispatch which I trust everybody
will read, and no one who reads it can doubt that, largely through the
efforts of my right honorable friend and colleague Sir Edward Grey [loud
cheers] the conditions of a peaceful settlement of the actual
controversy were already within sight when, on July 31, Germany [hisses]
by her own deliberate act made war a certainty.
The facts are incontrovertible. They are not sought to be controverted,
except, indeed, by the invention and circulation of such wanton
falsehoods as that France was contemplating, and even commencing, the
violation of Belgian territory as a first step on her road to Germany.
The result is that we are at war, and, as I have already shown
elsewhere, and as I repeat here tonight, we are at war for three
reasons--in the first place, to vindicate the sanctity of treaty
obligations ["Hear, hear!"] and of what is properly called the public
law of Europe, ["Hear, hear!";] in the second place, to assert and to
enforce the independence of free States, relatively small and weak,
against the encroachments and the violence of the strong, [cheers,] and,
in the third place, to withstand, as we believe in the best interests
not only of our own empire but of civilization at large, the arrogant
claim of a single power to dominate the development of the destinies of
Europe.
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