Can any one
who reads it fail to appreciate the tone of obvious sincerity and
earnestness which underlies it; can any one honestly doubt that the
Government of this country, in spite of great provocation--and I
regard the proposals made to us as proposals which we might have
thrown aside without consideration and almost without answer--can any
one doubt that in spite of great provocation the right hon. Gentleman,
who had already earned the title--and no one ever more deserved
it--of Peace Maker of Europe, persisted to the very last moment of the
last hour in that beneficent but unhappily frustrated purpose. I am
entitled to say, and I do so on behalf of this country--I speak not
for a party, I speak for the country as a whole--that we made every
effort any Government could possibly make for peace. But this war has
been forced upon us. What is it we are fighting for? Every one knows,
and no one knows better than the Government, the terrible incalculable
suffering, economic, social, personal and political, which war, and
especially a war between the Great Powers of the world, must entail.
There is no man amongst us sitting upon this bench in these trying
days--more trying perhaps than any body of statesmen for a hundred
years have had to pass through--there is not a man amongst us who has
not, during the whole of that time, had clearly before his vision the
almost unequalled suffering which war, even in a just cause, must
bring about, not only to the peoples who are for the moment living in
this country and in the other countries of the world, but to posterity
and to the whole prospects of European civilization.
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