Germany’s Profound Mistakes.

But in the judgment of those who guide and control German policy the hour had come to strike the blow that had been long and deliberately prepared.  In their hands lay the choice between peace and war, and their election was for war.  In so deciding, as everybody now knows, Germany made two profound miscalculations. [Cheers.] Both of them natural enough in a man who had come to believe that in international matters everything can be explained and measured in terms of material force.  What, gentlemen, were those mistakes?  The first was that Belgium, [cheers,] a small and prosperous country entirely disinterested in European quarrels, guaranteed by the joint and several compacts of the great powers, that Belgium would not resent, and certainly would not resist, the use of her territory as a highroad for an invading German force into France.  How could they imagine that this little country, rather than allow her neutrality to be violated and her independence insulted and menaced, was prepared that her fields should be drenched with the blood of her soldiers, her towns and villages devastated by marauders, her splendid heritage of monuments and of treasures, built up for her by the piety, art, and learning of the past, ruthlessly laid in ruins?  The passionate attachment of a numerically small population to the bit of territory, which looks so little upon the map, the pride and the unconquerable devotion of a free people to their own free State, these were things which apparently had never been dreamed of in the philosophy of Potsdam. [Laughter and “Hear, hear!”] Rarely in history has there been a greater material disparity between the invaders and the invaded, but the moral disparity was at least equally great. [Cheers.] For, gentlemen, the indomitable resistance of the Belgians did more than change the whole face of the campaign. [Cheers.] It proved to the world that ideas which cannot be weighed or measured by any material calculus can still inspire and dominate mankind. [Cheers.] And that is the reason why the whole sympathy of the civilized world at this moment is going out to these small States—­Belgium, Servia, and Montenegro—­that have played so worthy a part in this historic struggle. [Cheers.]

The Moral Bond of Civilization.

But, my Lord Mayor, Germany was guilty of another and a still more capital blunder in relation to ourselves. ["Hear, hear!”] I am not referring for the moment to the grotesque understanding upon which I dwelt a week ago at Edinburgh, their carefully fostered belief that we here were so rent with civil distraction, [laughter,] so paralyzed by luke-warmness or disaffection in our dominions and dependencies, that if it came to fighting we might be brushed aside as an impotent and even a negligible factor. [Cheers and cries of “Never!”] The German misconception went even deeper than that.  They asked themselves what interest, direct or material, had the United Kingdom