operations from the taint of shame.  We have been confronted with an exhibition of ruthlessness and outrage enforced upon the weak, enforced upon women and children.  We have been confronted with repeated breaches of the law of enlightened warfare, practices analogous to those which in private life are regarded as cheating, and which deprive persons or country adopting them, or condoning them, of the credit and respect due to honorable soldiers.

We have been confronted with all this.  Let us not imitate it. [Cheers.] Let us not try to make small retaliations and reprisals here and there.  Let us concentrate upon the simple, obvious task of creating a military force so powerful that the war, even in default of any good fortune, can certainly be ended and brought to a satisfactory conclusion.  However the war began, now that it is started it is a war of self-preservation for us.  Our civilization, our way of doing things, our political and Parliamentary life, with its voting and its thinking, our party system, our party warfare, the free and easy tolerance of British life, our method of doing things and of keeping ourselves alive and self-respecting in the world—­all these are brought into contrast, into collision, with the organized force of bureaucratic Prussian militarism.

That is the struggle which is opened now and which must go forward without pause or abatement until it is settled decisively and finally one way or the other.  On that there can be no compromise or truce.  It is our life or it is theirs.  We are bound, having gone so far, to go forward without flinching to the very end. [Cheers.]

“The Terror of Europe.”

This is the same great European war that would have fought in the year 1909 if Russia had not humbled herself and given way to German threats.  It is the same war that Sir Edward Grey stopped last year. [Loud cheers.] Now it has come upon us.  If you look back across the long periods of European history to the original cause, you will, I am sure, find it in the cruel terms enforced upon France in the year 1870, ["Hear, hear!”] and in the repeated bullyings and attempts to terrorize France which have been the characteristic of German policy ever since. [Cheers.] The more you study this question the more you will see that the use the Germans made of their three aggressive and victorious wars against Denmark, against Austria, and against France has been such as to make them the terror and the bully of Europe, the enemy and the menace of every small State upon their borders, and a perpetual source of unrest and disquietude to their powerful neighbors. [Cheers.]

Claims of Nationality.