erial calculus
can still inspire and dominate mankind. [Cheers.] And that is the reason
why the whole sympathy of the civilized world at this moment is going
out to these small States--Belgium, Servia, and Montenegro--that have
played so worthy a part in this historic struggle. [Cheers.]

The Moral Bond of Civilization.

But, my Lord Mayor, Germany was guilty of another and a still more
capital blunder in relation to ourselves. ["Hear, hear!"] I am not
referring for the moment to the grotesque understanding upon which I
dwelt a week ago at Edinburgh, their carefully fostered belief that we
here were so rent with civil distraction, [laughter,] so paralyzed by
luke-warmness or disaffection in our dominions and dependencies, that if
it came to fighting we might be brushed aside as an impotent and even a
negligible factor. [Cheers and cries of "Never!"] The German
misconception went even deeper than that. They asked themselves what
interest, direct or material, had the United Kingdom in this conflict?
Could any nation, least of all the cold, calculating, phlegmatic,
egotistic British nation, [laughter,] embark upon a costly and bloody
contest from which it had nothing in the hope of profit to expect?
["Hear, hear!"] They forgot--they forgot that we, like the Belgians, had
something at stake which cannot be translated into what one of our
poets has called "The law of nicely calculated less or more." What was
it we had at stake? First and foremost, the fulfillment to the small and
relatively weak country of our plighted word [cheers] and behind and
beyond that the maintenance of the whole system of international
good-will which is the moral bond of the civilized world. [Cheers.] Here
again they were wrong in thinking that the reign of ideas, Old World
ideas like those of duty and good faith, had been superseded by the
ascendency of force. My Lord Mayor, war is at all times a hideous thing;
at the best an evil to be chosen in preference to worse evils, and at
the worst little better than the letting loose of hell upon earth. The
prophet of old spoke of the "confused noise of battle and the garments
rolled in blood," but in these modern days, with the gigantic scale of
the opposing armies and the scientific developments of the instruments
of destruction, war has become an infinitely more devastating thing than
it ever was before. The hope that the general recognition of a humaner
code would soften or abate some of its worst br