first importance in Persia and elsewhere? Are the English people mere children thus to be fed on the pap of fatuous pacificism and convenient party misrepresentation at one of the most serious crises in the history of our race?" [4] It is, or ought to be, superfluous to rebut the frantic accusation brought against myself and the National Service League by a leading Liberal weekly on October 26--that of blood-lust. Can there be Englishmen--or men bearing English names--in whom all sense of personal honour is so decayed, that to resent a national affront or to defend their Fatherland from foreign aggression appears a duty from which they recoil in shuddering apprehension? [5] Since these words were spoken, with what an unparalleled rapidity has event crowded upon portentous event in the Near East! I have no wish to establish hasty analogies or to draw premature inferences; but what Englishman can consider the events of these past three weeks and remember without a pitying smile Lord Haldane's naïve assurance that with six months' training our Territorials would be ready for war! Did ever dilettantism so give itself away? [6] In March, 1911, when every pulpit and every newspaper, under the influence of President Taft's message, promised us within a brief period universal peace and disarmament, the German Chancellor, Herr Bethmann-Hollweg, had the courage and the common sense to stand apart, and, speaking for his Emperor and his nation, to lay it down as a maxim that, at the present stage of the world's history, the armed forces of any nation or empire must have a distinct relation to the material resources of that nation or empire. This position seems to me as statesmanlike as it is unanswerable; but in applying the principle to our own country, I should be inclined to modify it by saying that the armed forces of any nation or empire ought to represent, not only its material resources, but the spirit which animates that nation or empire--in a word, that its armed forces should be the measure of the nation's devotion to whatever ends it pursues. [7] For a more complete examination of this subject, I must refer the reader to the First Part of "Fallacies and Facts," published two years ago in answer to Lord Haldane's and Sir Ian Hamilton's "Compulsory Service." [8] Since these words were spoken a remarkable series of letters in the _Daily Mail_, emanating from every grade in the Territorial Army itself, has illustrated and demonstrated this position point by point. [9] See, for example, my speech at the Mansion House, which forms the second part of the present publication.