[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.
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