FOOTNOTES:
[81] Great Britain and the European Crisis, No. 101.
[82] House of Commons, August 6, 1914.
[83] South Wales Daily News, October 3, 1914.
IF BRITAIN HAD REFUSED TO FIGHT.
If, in view of all this evidence, Britain had refused to fight, what would have been her position? The Prime Minister, speaking at the Guildhall on September 4, 1914, said:—
"But let me ask you, and through you the world outside, what would have been our condition as a nation to-day if, through timidity, or through a perverted calculation of self-interest or through a paralysis of the sense of honour and duty, we had been base enough to be false to our word and faithless to our friends?
"Our eyes would have been turned at this moment with those of the whole civilised world to Belgium—a small State which has lived for more than 70 years under a several and collective guarantee, to which we, in common with Prussia and Austria, were parties—and we should have seen, at the instance, and by the action of two of these guaranteeing Powers, her neutrality violated, her independence strangled, her territory made use of as affording the easiest and most convenient road to a war of unprovoked aggression against France.
"We, the British people, should have at this moment been standing by with folded arms and with such countenance as we could command, while this small and unprotected State (Belgium), in defence of her vital liberties, made a heroic stand against overweening and overwhelming force.
"We should have been watching as detached spectators the siege of Liège, the steady and manful resistance of a small Army, the occupation of Brussels with its splendid traditions and memories, the gradual forcing back of the patriotic defenders of their native land to the ramparts of Antwerp, countless outrages suffered by them, and buccaneering levies exacted from the unoffending civil population, and finally the greatest crime committed against civilisation and culture since the Thirty Years' War—the sack of Louvain, with its buildings, its pictures, its unique library, its unrivalled associations, a shameless holocaust of irreparable treasures lit up by blind barbarian vengeance....
"For my part I say that sooner than be a silent witness—which means in effect a willing accomplice—of this tragic triumph of force over law and of brutality over freedom, I would see this country of ours blotted out of the pages of history."
Further, we need not imagine that the peace we should have gained would have been a lasting one. If we had dishonoured our name in the manner Mr. Asquith has described, we should have been left without a friend in the world. Who can doubt that we should have been Germany's next victim if she had succeeded in crushing Belgium and France and warding off the blows of Russia? As Mr. Bonar Law said, on the same occasion:—
"We are fighting for our national existence, for everything which nations have always held most dear."
The fate which has fallen upon Belgium would have been our fate in a few years' time, but with this difference, that we should have had no powerful friends to give back as far as humanly possible what we had lost, as Russia, France and Britain are determined to do for Belgium.