he theatre of
conflict, the outpouring of blood and the loss of life, the incalculable
toll of suffering levied upon non-combatants, the material and moral
loss accumulating day by day to the higher interests of civilized
mankind--a contest which in every one of these aspects is without
precedent in the annals of the world. ["Hear, hear!"] We were very
confident three years ago in the rightness of our position, when we
welcomed the new securities for peace. We are equally confident in it
today, when reluctantly, and against our will, but with a clear judgment
and a clean conscience, [cheers,] we find ourselves involved with the
whole strength of this empire in a bloody arbitration between might and
right [Cheers.] The issue has passed out of the domain of argument into
another field, but let me ask you, and through you the world outside,
what would have been our condition as a nation today if we had been base
enough through timidity or through perverted calculation of
self-interest, or through a paralysis of the sense of honor and duty,
[cheers,] if we had been base enough to be false to our word and
faithless to our friends?

Blind Barbarian Vengeance.

Our eyes would have been turned at this moment with those of the whole
civilized world to Belgium, a small State, which has lived for more than
seventy years under the several and collective guarantee to which we in
common with Prussia and Austria were parties, and we should have seen at
the instance and by the action of two of these guaranteeing powers her
neutrality violated, her independence strangled, her territory made use
of as affording the easiest and the most convenient road to a war of
unprovoked aggression against France. We, the British people, would at
this moment have been standing by with folded arms and with such
countenance as we could command while this small and unprotected State,
in defense of her vital liberties, made a heroic stand against
overweening and overwhelming force; we should have been admiring as
detached spectators the siege of Liege, the steady and manful resistance
of a small army to the occupation of their capital, with its splendid
traditions and memories, the gradual forcing back of the patriotic
defenders of their native land to the ramparts of Antwerp, countless
outrages inflicted by buccaneering levies exacted from the unoffending
civil population, and, finally, the greatest crime committed against
civilization and culture sinc