Lord Roberts' Message to the Nation

by Earl Frederick Sleigh Roberts Roberts

Now, gentlemen, at the present day, now in the year 1912, our German friends, I am well aware, do not, at least in sensible circles, assert dogmatically that a war with Great Britain will take place this year or next; but in their heart of hearts they know, every man of them,[[3]] that, just as in 1866 and just as in 1870, war will take place the instant the German forces by land and sea are, by their superiority at every point, as certain of victory as anything in human calculation can be made certain. "Germany strikes when Germany's hour has struck." That is the time-honoured policy of her Foreign Office. That was the policy relentlessly pursued by Bismarck and Moltke in 1866 and 1870; it has been her policy decade by decade since that date; it is her policy at the present hour. And, gentlemen, it is an excellent policy. It is, or should be, the policy of every nation prepared to play a great part in history. Under that policy Germany has, within the last ten years, sprung, as at a bound, from one of the weakest of naval Powers to the greatest naval Power, save one, upon this globe. But yesterday, so to speak, the British Fleets did not feel the furrow of a German war-keel on the wide seas. To-day every British warship and every British merchant vessel thrills in all her iron nerves to that mighty presence. Just as in 1866, by the massing of her armies towards this frontier or towards that frontier, Prussia controlled the action of Austria, so Germany constrains the action of England at the present day. Do you wish for proofs? I point to the gradual displacement of the British Fleet before the German menace. I point to the Mediterranean, bereft of British battleships, and to the gradual narrowing, year by year, of our once far-flung battle-line.

We may stand still: Germany always advances, and the direction of her advance, the line along which she is moving, is now most manifest. It is towards that consummation which I have described—a complete supremacy by land and sea. She has built a mighty fleet; but, as if nothing were done so long as anything stands between her and her goal, still she presses on—here establishing a new Heligoland, for every available island in the North Sea has been fortified—there enclosing Holland in a network of new canals, and deepening old riverbeds for the swifter transport of the munitions of war, whether to her army or her fleet.

Contrasted with our own apathy or puerile and spasmodic efforts, how impressive is this magnificent and unresting energy! It has the mark of true greatness; it extorts admiration even from those against whom it is directed!

But, it is urged by the advocates of universal peace, how monstrous is this expenditure of human strength and human ingenuity, if unused, and how yet more monstrous the waste of human life if actually used in war![[4]] And how much more sane is the policy of Cobden and of Bright and of their imitators or followers at the present day! Gentlemen, arguments which prove the folly and criminality of war are, at the present stage of history, like the arguments which prove the folly and criminality of ambition and of the love of glory. Even those who argue most eloquently against glory do, by that very eloquence, seek to win glory; and those who argue most forcibly against war do, nevertheless, live, and for long will continue to live, under an invisible power which has made war an inseparable portion of human polity. Much, during the autumn of 1911, was said and written upon arbitration. America's action in the Panama Canal, and the impotence of diplomatists in the Balkan crisis,[[5]] are again history's ironic comment in the autumn of 1912! Arbitration most certainly is more humane than war; but, at the present stage of the polity of nations, arbitration again and again refuses to extend itself to some of the most vital and essential questions—questions which, to a nation or empire sensitive alike to its honour and to its abiding interests, make war unavoidable.

Again, we have heard much during the current year of the power of Labour in international politics. The German Socialist, it is said, will not make war upon his French or his English comrade. Gentlemen, it is to the credit of the human race that patriotism, in the presence of such organizations, has always proved itself superior to any class or any individual. Love of country has on the actual day of battle always proved itself superior to love of profit. That law has not been abrogated, and if war broke out to-morrow the German working man would quit himself like a German, and the British working man, I hope, like a Briton.

Hence, gentlemen, the mistrust with which I have always viewed the proposals of British Ministers for a limitation of armaments. Emanating from Great Britain, such proposals must always, I imagine, impress a foreign observer as either too early or too late in English history. For how was this Empire of Britain founded? War founded this Empire—war and conquest! When we, therefore, masters by war of one-third of the habitable globe, when we propose to Germany to disarm, to curtail her navy or diminish her army, Germany naturally refuses; and pointing, not without justice, to the road by which England, sword in hand, has climbed to her unmatched eminence, declares openly, or in the veiled language of diplomacy, that by the same path, if by no other, Germany is determined also to ascend! Who amongst us, knowing the past of this nation, and the past of all nations and cities that have ever added the lustre of their name to human annals, can accuse Germany or regard the utterance of one of her greatest Chancellors a year and a half ago,[[6]] or of General Bernhardi three months ago, with any feelings except those of respect?

Gentlemen, other world-Powers besides Germany have arisen and are arising around us; but there is one way in which Britain can have peace, not only with Germany, but with every other Power, national or imperial, and that is, to present such a battle-front by sea and land that no Power or probable combination of Powers shall dare to attack her without the certainty of disaster. That is the only reply worthy of our past and wise for our future which we can or ought to make to those unparalleled efforts which I have described. And there is a way in which England can have war; there is a way in which she is certain to have war and its horrors and calamities: it is by persisting in her present course, her apathy, unintelligence, blindness, and in her disregard of the warnings of the most ordinary political insight, as well as of the examples of history.

And what is the lesson which History enforces? Of two courses you must choose one: you must either abandon your Empire, and with it your mercantile wealth; or, in the world as it is at present, be prepared to defend it.

But, you will say, are we so unprepared? Have we not a Fleet? Have we not an Army?

We have a Fleet, but that Fleet is rapidly becoming unequal to the fleets by which we may be opposed, and by the inadequacy of our land forces it is maimed and hampered in its very nature as a Fleet. For the essence of a Fleet in such an Empire as ours is the utmost mobility: it must have complete freedom of action. But if, in addition to its own duties, our Fleet has to perform the role of an army of defence, what must follow? It becomes a "wooden wall" indeed, unmoving and inert, anchored around these shores. It is helpless to protect our food-supplies, without the regular arrival of which we must starve.