torate, nor do the consequences of a
mistaken policy recoil so directly and so unmistakably upon them.
These subjects, therefore, are the happy hunting-ground of the
visionary and the phrase-maker. I have seen the people of this country
talked into a policy with regard to South Africa at once so injurious
to their own interests, and so base towards those who had thrown in
their lot with us and trusted us, that, if the British nation had only
known what that policy really meant, they would have spat it out of
their mouths. And I tremble every day lest, on the vital question of
Defence, the pressure of well-meaning but ignorant idealists, or the
meaner influence of vote-catching demagogues, should lead this
Government or, indeed, any Government, to curtail the provisions,
already none too ample, for the safety of the Empire, in order to pose
as the friends of peace or as special adepts in economy. I know these
savings of a million or two a year over say five or ten years, which
cost you fifty or one hundred millions, wasted through unreadiness
when the crisis comes, to say nothing of the waste of gallant lives
even more precious. This is the kind of question about which the
democracy is liable to be misled, being without the corrective of
direct personal contact with the facts to keep it straight. And it is
unpopular and up-hill work to go on reminding people of the vastness
of the duty and the responsibility which the control of so great a
portion of the earth's surface, with a dependent population of three
or four hundred millions, necessarily involves; to go on reminding
them, too, how their own prosperity and even existence in these
islands are linked by a hundred subtle but not always obvious or
superficially apparent threads with the maintenance of those great
external possessions.

I say these are difficulties which any party or any man, who is
prepared to do his duty by the electorate of this country, not merely
to ingratiate himself with them for the moment, but to win their
confidence by deserving it, by telling them the truth, by serving
their permanent interests and not their passing moods, is bound to
face. For my own part, I have always been perfectly frank on these
questions. I have maintained on many platforms, I am prepared to
maintain here to-night and shall always maintain, although this is a
subject on which it may be long before my views are included in any
party programme--I say I shall always maint