Lord Roberts' Message to the Nation

by Earl Frederick Sleigh Roberts Roberts

Speech delivered in the Mansion House,
July 22, 1912.

MY LORD MAYOR, MY LORDS, AND GENTLEMEN,

It is seven years, almost to the day, since I had the honour of addressing a meeting of City men in this historic House on the subject of Imperial Defence. On that occasion I prefaced my remarks by saying: "I have but one object in coming before you to-day, namely, to bring home to my fellow-countrymen the vital necessity of their taking into their earnest consideration our unpreparedness for war." I then affirmed that the armed forces of this country were as absolutely unfitted and unprepared for war as they were in 1899-1900. And, my Lords and gentlemen, I grieve to have this afternoon to repeat to you that we are now scarcely better fitted or better prepared to carry on a war to-day than in 1905. The experience that we gained in the Boer War has had little effect upon our general military policy. We have neglected, except as regards the Regular Army, to profit by the lessons which that war ought to have taught us.

What are the causes of this indifference and this deep-seated apathy?

The causes, I think, are not far to seek. In the first place, if you will permit me as a soldier to speak with the frankness of a soldier, it is one of the most dangerous tendencies of a nation, especially a democratic and self-confident nation, devoted to commerce and industry as we are, to ignore so disturbing and apparently so remote a contingency as our being forced into war. But there is another more immediate and a more particular cause, and it is to this that I mainly wish to direct your attention this afternoon.

Those who are responsible for our defences—and I must include in this category the late Minister for War—are, I maintain, either so blind to the lessons of history, or so enamoured of their own schemes, that they have deliberately lulled the nation into the belief that our present system is adequate, and that we are amply prepared to meet any dangers which come within the sphere of consideration by practical men. Thus the very men who ought to declare the facts in the plainest terms to the nation, the very men who ought to be endeavouring to rouse the nation from its fatal apathy, are the men who are fostering that spirit of indifference and self-confidence to which the nation of itself is already too prone. A democracy like ours will never take the necessary measures to safeguard itself so long as Ministers and a partisan Press proclaim that we are as a nation perfectly safe, when, as a matter of fact, our position is precarious in the extreme. This is a serious statement; but, if you will have patience with me, I hope to convince you that it is well founded, and it can be demonstrated from the principles of Imperial Defence which Lord Haldane has so frequently, and, it must be admitted, so plausibly, urged upon us.

My Lords and gentlemen, I have on many occasions paid a tribute to Lord Haldane's services. He has placed the problems of National Defence upon what is, for a British Minister, a new and comprehensive basis; and he will go down to posterity as the first British statesman who, in theory, embodied in an actual scheme the idea of a National Army, "A Nation in Arms." This conception is so important to my whole subject this afternoon that it is worth while to recall some of Lord Haldane's expressed ideas with regard to it.

Speaking at Newcastle-on-Tyne in September, 1906, Lord Haldane said that we must have a highly trained nucleus in time of peace, and must look for a great expansion in time of war, "and for that expansion we must go to the nation, and ask for the co-operation of the nation," adding: "A nation in arms is the only safeguard for the public interests," and that "this idea has been neglected in our military contemplation. The problem," he went on to say, "is not a problem of the Regular Forces nearly so much as the problem of the nation in arms, of the people as a whole, with all the forces of the country welded into one."

Such an expression of opinion by the newly-created Secretary of State for War was to many of us an augury of great hope. It seemed that at last Great Britain might have an army adapted to modern conditions of war; that we had at last a Minister who not only understood, but had enunciated in a clear and masterly manner our own conception of a Nation in Arms. From that time forward, we imagined, the Nation in Arms would be regarded as a vigorous trunk from which the Regular Army and the personnel of the Navy would spring forth as branches, drawing their sap and the vigour of their life from the qualities—mental, moral, and physical—of the nation itself. For that, and no other, is the real meaning of the phrase "A Nation in Arms."

Such, my Lords and gentlemen, was Lord Haldane's language in September, 1906—less than six years ago. Might it not be imagined that he was speaking as President of the National Service League, addressing a meeting such as I am addressing to-day?