ct, became indefensible. If they said nothing in
support of the tearing up of the promise of peace to Belgium, it is
simply because there was nothing to be said.

You were the first people to talk about World-Politics; and the first
people to disregard them altogether. Even your foreign policy is
domestic policy. It does not even apply to any people who are not
Germans; and of your wild guesses about some twenty other peoples, not
one has gone right even by accident. Your two or three shots at my own
not immaculate land have been such that you would have been much nearer
the truth if you had tried to invade England by crossing the Caucasus,
or to discover England among the South Sea Islands. With your first
delusion, that our courage was calculated and malignant when in truth
our very corruption was timid and confused, I have already dealt. The
case is the same with your second favourite phrase; that the British
army is mercenary. You learnt it in books and not in battlefields; and I
should like to be present at a scene in which you tried to bribe the
most miserable little loafer in Hammersmith as if he were a cynical
condottiere selling his spear to some foreign city. It is not the fact,
my dear sir. You have been misinformed. The British Army is not at this
moment a hireling army any more than it is a conscript army. It is a
volunteer army in the strict sense of the word; nor do I object to your
calling it an amateur army. There is no compulsion, and there is next to
no pay. It is at this moment drawn from every class of the community,
and there are very few classes which would not earn a little more money
in their ordinary trades. It numbers very nearly as many men as it would
if it were a conscript army; that is with the necessary margin of men
unable to serve or needed to serve otherwise. Ours is a country in which
that democratic spirit which is common to Christendom is rather
unusually sluggish and far below the surface. And the most genuine and
purely popular movement that we have had since the Chartists has been
the enlistment for this war. By all means say that such vague and
sentimental volunteering is valueless in war if you think so; or even
if you don't think so. By all means say that Germany is unconquerable
and that we cannot really kill you. But if you say that we do not really
want to kill you, you do us an injustice. You do indeed.

I need not consider the yet crazier things that some of you have said