But if the voluntary system had disadvantages, it also presented us with advantages.  The professional and therefore voluntary nature of our army, which, because it was professional, was always ready for sending overseas on expeditions, was in reality made necessary by our position as the island center of a great and scattered Empire.  We had increased that Empire enormously by the possession of a voluntarily serving army.  Whether this vast increase of the Empire has been always defensible I am not discussing.  What I am saying is that we owe the actual increases largely to this, that we were the only Power in the world that was ready to step in at short notice and occupy vacant territory.  We always had a much larger Expeditionary Force available for this special purpose than Germany or any other country.  That has been our tradition, as contrasted with the tradition of other nations who have been limited in this kind of capacity by the necessity of putting their military forces on a compulsory basis and keeping them at home for the protection of their land frontiers.  Ours was the method in which we had been schooled by experience.

It is for such reasons as I have now submitted that I am wholly unable to assent to the suggestion that we did not look ahead, or considered within the years just before the war whether we were preparing to make the sort of contribution that our own interests and our friendships alike required.  Sea power was for us then, as always before in our history, the dominant element in military policy.  I have little doubt that we made mistakes over details.  That is inherent in human and therefore finite effort.  But I believe that we did in the main the best we could for the fulfilment of our only purpose, which was to preserve the peace of the world and avoid contributing to its disturbance, and also to prepare to defend ourselves and our friends against aggression.  Talk to the public we could not, for it would have hindered and not helped us to do so.  A “preventive war,” which the Entente Powers would not have been so ready to meet as they became later on, might well have been the result.  Rhetorical declarations on platforms would have been wholly out of place.  But we could think, and to the best of such abilities as we and our expert advisers possessed, we did try to think.

A curious legend which had its origin in Berlin, in October, 1914, has obtained such currency that it is worth while to make an end of it.  The legend is that the British Military Attache at Brussels, the late General Barnardiston, had informed the Chief of the Belgian General Staff of secret plans, prepared at the War Office in London, to invade Belgium, and if necessary to violate her neutrality, in order to make an expedition, the purpose of which was to attack Germany through that country.  The story appears to have emanated from Baron Greindl, who was the Belgian Minister at Berlin in 1911.  He had been completely