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1911.
May 1st.
... I want you to think over getting the Prime Minister to originate an enquiry for a great British Governmental Wireless Monopoly, or rather I would say “English Speaking” Monopoly! No one at the Admiralty or elsewhere has as yet any the least idea of the immense revolution both for Peace and War purposes which will be brought about by the future development of wireless!... The point is that this scheme wants to be engineered by the Biggest Boss, i.e. the Prime Minister.... Believe me the wireless in the future is the soul and spirit of Peace and War, and therefore must be in the hands of the Committee of Defence! You can’t cut the air! You can cut a telegraph cable!
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1911.
June 25th. Bad Nauheim.
... You will see in the Standard of May 29th the London Correspondent of the Irish Times lets out about Lord Fisher and war arrangements, but as the Standard in the very same issue makes this announcement in big type: “We (Great Britain) are in the satisfactory position of having twice as many Dreadnoughts in commission as Germany and a number greater by one unit than the whole of the rest of the world put together!” I don’t think there is the very faintest fear of war! How wonderfully Providence guides England! Just when there is a quite natural tendency to ease down our Naval endeavours comes Agadir!
“Time and the Ocean and some Guiding Star
In High Cabal have made us what we are!”
“The Greatest Power on ’Airth,’” as Mr. Champ Clarke would say! (You ought to meet Champ Clarke.) He is likely to succeed Taft as President, but I put my money on Woodrow Wilson. He is Bismarck and Moltke rolled into one!... I need not say that I remain in the closest bonds with the Admiralty. I never did a wiser thing than coming abroad and remaining abroad and working like a mole. I shall not return till July, 1912. Most damnable efforts against me continue in full swing: nevertheless like Gideon—“Faint yet pursuing” is my motto.... And yet because in 1909 at the Guildhall when our Naval supremacy had been arranged for in the Navy Estimates of the year I said to my countrymen “Sleep quiet in your beds!” I was vehemently vilified with malignant truculence, and only yesterday I got a letter from an Aristocrat of the Aristocrats, saying he had heard it stated by a Man of Eminence the day before that I was in the pay of Germany! It is curious that I can’t get over the personal great blank I feel in the death of our late blessed Friend King Edward! There was something in the charm of his heart that still chains one to his memory—some magnetic touch!
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