rther division to be added to the six at home.

But if the voluntary system had disadvantages, it also presented us with
advantages. The professional and therefore voluntary nature of our army,
which, because it was professional, was always ready for sending
overseas on expeditions, was in reality made necessary by our position
as the island center of a great and scattered Empire. We had increased
that Empire enormously by the possession of a voluntarily serving army.
Whether this vast increase of the Empire has been always defensible I am
not discussing. What I am saying is that we owe the actual increases
largely to this, that we were the only Power in the world that was ready
to step in at short notice and occupy vacant territory. We always had a
much larger Expeditionary Force available for this special purpose than
Germany or any other country. That has been our tradition, as contrasted
with the tradition of other nations who have been limited in this kind
of capacity by the necessity of putting their military forces on a
compulsory basis and keeping them at home for the protection of their
land frontiers. Ours was the method in which we had been schooled by
experience.

It is for such reasons as I have now submitted that I am wholly unable
to assent to the suggestion that we did not look ahead, or considered
within the years just before the war whether we were preparing to make
the sort of contribution that our own interests and our friendships
alike required. Sea power was for us then, as always before in our
history, the dominant element in military policy. I have little doubt
that we made mistakes over details. That is inherent in human and
therefore finite effort. But I believe that we did in the main the best
we could for the fulfilment of our only purpose, which was to preserve
the peace of the world and avoid contributing to its disturbance, and
also to prepare to defend ourselves and our friends against aggression.
Talk to the public we could not, for it would have hindered and not
helped us to do so. A "preventive war," which the Entente Powers would
not have been so ready to meet as they became later on, might well have
been the result. Rhetorical declarations on platforms would have been
wholly out of place. But we could think, and to the best of such
abilities as we and our expert advisers possessed, we did try to think.

A curious legend which had its origin in Berlin, in October, 1914, has
obtained