Programme for you--the only basis for a permanent peace in the
world. There's no further good in having venerable children build
houses of sand at The Hague; there's no further good in peace
organizations or protective leagues to enforce peace. We had as
well get down to facts. So far as ensuring peace is concerned the
biggest fact in the world is the British fleet. The next biggest
fact is the American fleet, because of itself and still more
because of the vast reserve power of the United States which it
implies. If these two fleets perfectly understand one another about
the undesirability of wars of aggression, there'll be no more big
wars as long as this understanding continues. Such an understanding
calls for no treaty--it calls only for courtesy.

And there is no other peace-basis worth talking about--by men who
know how the world is governed.

Since I have lived here I have spent my days and nights, my poor
brain, and my small fortune all most freely and gladly to get some
understanding of the men who rule this Kingdom, and of the women
and the customs and the traditions that rule these men--to get
their trick of thought, the play of their ideals, the working of
their imagination, the springs of their instincts. It is impossible
for any man to know just how well he himself does such a difficult
task--how accurately he is coming to understand the sources and
character of a people's actions. Yet, at the worst, I do know
something about the British: I know enough to make very sure of the
soundness of my conclusion that they are necessary to us and we to
them. Else God would have permitted the world to be peopled in some
other way. And when we see that the world will be saved by such an
artificial combination as England and Russia and France and Japan
and Serbia, it calls for no great wisdom to see the natural way
whereby it must be saved in the future.

For this reason every day that I have lived here it has been my
conscious aim to do what I could to bring about a condition that
shall make sure of this--that, whenever we may have need of the
British fleet to protect our shores or to prevent an aggressive war
anywhere, it shall he ours by a natural impulse and necessity--even
without the asking.

I have found out that the first ste