German “Culture.”

Let me then ask for a moment what is this German culture, what is this German spirit of which the Emperor’s armies are at present the missionaries in Belgium and in France? [Laughter.] Mankind owes much to Germany, a very great debt for the contributions she has made to philosophy, to science and to the arts; but that which is specifically German in the movement of the world in the last thirty years has been, on the intellectual side, the development of the doctrine of the supreme and ultimate prerogative in human affairs of material forces, and, on the practical side, taking of the foremost place in the fabrication and the multiplication of the machinery of destruction.

To the men who have adopted this gospel, who believe that power is the be all and end all of the State, naturally a treaty is nothing more than a piece of parchment, and all the Old World talk about the rights of the weak and the obligations of the strong is only so much threadbare and nauseating cant, for one very remarkable feature of this new school of doctrine is, whatever be its intellectual or its ethical merits, that it has turned out as an actual code for life to be a very purblind philosophy.

The German culture, the German spirit, did not save the Emperor and his people from delusions and miscalculations as dangerous as they were absurd in regard to the British Empire.

A Fantastic Dream.

We were believed by these cultivated observers [laughter] to be the decadent descendants of a people who, by a combination of luck and of fraud, [laughter,] had managed to obtain dominion over a vast quantity of the surface and the populations of the globe.

This fortuitous aggregation [laughter and cheers] which goes by the name of the British Empire was supposed to be so insecurely founded, and so loosely knit together, that at the first touch of serious menace from without it would fall to pieces and tumble to the ground. [Cheers.]

Our great dominions were getting heartily tired of the imperial connection.  India, [loud cheers,] it was notorious to every German traveler, [laughter,] was on the verge of open revolt, and here at home we, the people of this United Kingdom, were riven by dissension so deep and so fierce that our energies, whether for resistance or for attack, would be completely paralyzed.

What a fantastic dream, ["Hear, hear!”] and what a rude awakening! [Laughter and cheers.] And in this vast and grotesque and yet tragic miscalculation is to be found one of the roots, perhaps the main root, of the present war.

But let us go one step more.  It has been said, “By their fruits ye shall know them,” and history will record that when the die was cast and the struggle began, it was the disciples of that same creed who revived methods of warfare which have for centuries past been condemned by the common sense as well as by the humanity of the great mass of the civilized world. [Cheers.]