LORD ROBERTS' MESSAGE TO THE NATION
PART I
PEACE AND WAR
A SPEECH TO THE CITIZENS OF MANCHESTER,
OCTOBER 25, 1912.
MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN,
This is only the second occasion in a long life on which I have had the privilege of speaking in your city; and it is with no inadequate sense of the value of that occasion and of the responsibility attaching to the position which, for the past ten years, I have taken up towards this Empire and its armies that I come before you this afternoon. For in the upbuilding of that Empire what city in our dominions has taken a more conspicuous part than this city, made illustrious almost since its foundation by commercial enterprise and by its political sagacity and spirit in affairs? In the eighteenth century your merchants aided the designs of the elder Pitt, and of the statesmen who followed him, in founding that power in India and the East which to-day is the envy and the admiration of the nations. In the nineteenth, within my own memory, your city, under the unforgotten leadership of John Bright, Richard Cobden, and Milner Gibson, gave a great watchword[[1]] to a great and still living party, and by its resolute effort forced through Parliament the repeal of the Corn Laws, one of the most momentous and revolutionary measures in this nation's history.
Nor, in more recent times, has Manchester abated her zeal or her vital energy in every phase of English political life. The greatest, most temperate, and statesmanlike Liberal newspaper in England is night by night printed within your walls; so that, at least in one phase of our national life and amongst one group of our fellow-citizens—the Liberal party, that is to say—it is literally true that what Manchester thinks to-night London thinks to-morrow. And a certain election the other day, and the overflow meetings which, I understand, have been held in favour of Tariff Reform within the sacred precincts of the Free Trade Hall itself, give a further proof that here in Manchester you are not petrified in your opinions, but that the stream of your political life flows fresh and from the fountain-head.
Judge then, gentlemen, whether it was not with some concern that I looked forward to this occasion; judge whether it was not with some searching of the heart that I reflected upon what I have this afternoon to say to you. For does it not appear at first sight as if what I have to say is not merely antagonistic to the teaching of the two greatest names of the Manchester School, John Bright and Richard Cobden, but is in every way the contradiction of the characterizing ideas and the traditions associated with this city itself?
For I come before you to-day to advocate the necessity of National Service; to affirm once more that the "Nation in Arms" is the only worthy and sure bulwark of this Empire and these islands.[[2]] Cobden, on the other hand, has left it on record that he considered it the glory and the exceeding great reward of all his labours that he had contributed, in however small a degree, to that universal disarmament of Europe, which, he sanguinely hoped, would be the result of Free Trade and of expanding commerce and the organization of labour. And John Bright, his great colleague, in one speech after another, added the lustre of his eloquence to that same high and flattering anticipation. I can remember easily the ardent and sympathetic reception which those anticipations met in the France of Louis Napoleon; I can remember also the added weight which France's enthusiasm gave to those happy anticipations here in England. War, indeed, seemed at an end. To-morrow, it seemed, we should be turning our barracks into granaries and our arsenals into banking houses.
Gentlemen, I am, I trust, doing no wrong to the memory of these statesmen when I point out that in the very years—nay, in the very months—that they were cherishing these illusions of peace and universal disarmament, in those very months the mightiest and most disciplined force that this earth has ever contained was silently being drilled in that wide region from the Rhine to the Elbe and the Oder, and from the North Sea to the Bavarian frontier, until, the right hour having struck, that army disclosed itself in all its prodigious and crushing mass and in all its unmatched capacity for destruction and war. And, amid those auspicious dreams of peace, for what was that army being trained? Koeniggrätz, Metz, St. Privat, and Sedan are the answer. Nor did that army pause until upon the ruins of the Empire of the third Napoleon—upon the ruins, I may say, of France, unprepared in peace, and in war scattered and dismayed—it had reared a new Empire, the Empire of William I., of Frederick I., and of William II., for whose personal character, noble and imaginative patriotism, and capacities as a ruler, I yield to no man in my admiration. Such, gentlemen, was history's ironic comment upon John Bright's and Richard Cobden's eloquently-urged enthusiasm. Let me not increase by any word of mine the crushing weight of Destiny's criticism.