e."

Let me then ask for a moment what is this German culture, what is this
German spirit of which the Emperor's armies are at present the
missionaries in Belgium and in France? [Laughter.] Mankind owes much to
Germany, a very great debt for the contributions she has made to
philosophy, to science and to the arts; but that which is specifically
German in the movement of the world in the last thirty years has been,
on the intellectual side, the development of the doctrine of the supreme
and ultimate prerogative in human affairs of material forces, and, on
the practical side, taking of the foremost place in the fabrication and
the multiplication of the machinery of destruction.

To the men who have adopted this gospel, who believe that power is the
be all and end all of the State, naturally a treaty is nothing more than
a piece of parchment, and all the Old World talk about the rights of the
weak and the obligations of the strong is only so much threadbare and
nauseating cant, for one very remarkable feature of this new school of
doctrine is, whatever be its intellectual or its ethical merits, that it
has turned out as an actual code for life to be a very purblind
philosophy.

The German culture, the German spirit, did not save the Emperor and his
people from delusions and miscalculations as dangerous as they were
absurd in regard to the British Empire.

A Fantastic Dream.

We were believed by these cultivated observers [laughter] to be the
decadent descendants of a people who, by a combination of luck and of
fraud, [laughter,] had managed to obtain dominion over a vast quantity
of the surface and the populations of the globe.

This fortuitous aggregation [laughter and cheers] which goes by the name
of the British Empire was supposed to be so insecurely founded, and so
loosely knit together, that at the first touch of serious menace from
without it would fall to pieces and tumble to the ground. [Cheers.]

Our great dominions were getting heartily tired of the imperial
connection. India, [loud cheers,] it was notorious to every German
traveler, [laughter,] was on the verge of open revolt, and here at home
we, the people of this United Kingdom, were riven by dissension so deep
and so fierce that our energies, whether for resistance or for attack,
would be completely paralyzed.

What a fantastic dream, ["Hear, hear!"] and what a rude awakening!
[Laughter and cheers.] And in this vast and grotesque and yet tragic
mi