My Lord Mayor and Citizens of London:  It is three and a half years since I last had the honor of addressing in this hall a gathering of the citizens.  We were then met under the Presidency of one of your predecessors, men of all creeds and parties, to celebrate and approve the joint declaration of the two great English-speaking States that for the future any differences between them should be settled, if not by agreement, at least by judicial inquiry and arbitration, and never in any circumstances by war. [Cheers.] Those of us who hailed that great Eirenicon between the United States and ourselves as a landmark on the road of progress were not sanguine enough to think, or even to hope, that the era of war was drawing to a close.  But still less were we prepared to anticipate the terrible spectacle which now confronts us of a contest which for the number and importance of the powers engaged, the scale of their armaments and armies, the width of the theatre of conflict, the outpouring of blood and the loss of life, the incalculable toll of suffering levied upon non-combatants, the material and moral loss accumulating day by day to the higher interests of civilized mankind—­a contest which in every one of these aspects is without precedent in the annals of the world. ["Hear, hear!”] We were very confident three years ago in the rightness of our position, when we welcomed the new securities for peace.  We are equally confident in it today, when reluctantly, and against our will, but with a clear judgment and a clean conscience, [cheers,] we find ourselves involved with the whole strength of this empire in a bloody arbitration between might and right [Cheers.] The issue has passed out of the domain of argument into another field, but let me ask you, and through you the world outside, what would have been our condition as a nation today if we had been base enough through timidity or through perverted calculation of self-interest, or through a paralysis of the sense of honor and duty, [cheers,] if we had been base enough to be false to our word and faithless to our friends?

Blind Barbarian Vengeance.

Our eyes would have been turned at this moment with those of the whole civilized world to Belgium, a small State, which has lived for more than seventy years under the 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 the most convenient road to a war of unprovoked aggression against France.  We, the British people, would at this moment have been standing by with folded arms and with such countenance as we could command while this small and unprotected State, in defense of her vital liberties, made a heroic stand against overweening and overwhelming force; we should have been admiring as detached spectators the siege of Liege, the steady