My Lords and gentlemen, I have on many occasions paid a tribute to Lord Haldane's services. He has placed the problems of National Defence upon what is, for a British Minister, a new and comprehensive basis; and he will go down to posterity as the first British statesman who, in theory, embodied in an actual scheme the idea of a National Army, "A Nation in Arms." This conception is so important to my whole subject this afternoon that it is worth while to recall some of Lord Haldane's expressed ideas with regard to it. Speaking at Newcastle-on-Tyne in September, 1906, Lord Haldane said that we must have a highly trained nucleus in time of peace, and must look for a great expansion in time of war, "and for that expansion we must go to the nation, and ask for the co-operation of the nation," adding: "A nation in arms is the only safeguard for the public interests," and that "this idea has been neglected in our military contemplation. The problem," he went on to say, "is not a problem of the Regular Forces nearly so much as the problem of the nation in arms, of the people as a whole, with all the forces of the country welded into one." Such an expression of opinion by the newly-created Secretary of State for War was to many of us an augury of great hope. It seemed that at last Great Britain might have an army adapted to modern conditions of war; that we had at last a Minister who not only understood, but had enunciated in a clear and masterly manner our own conception of a Nation in Arms. From that time forward, we imagined, the Nation in Arms would be regarded as a vigorous trunk from which the Regular Army and the personnel of the Navy would spring forth as branches, drawing their sap and the vigour of their life from the qualities--mental, moral, and physical--of the nation itself. For that, and no other, is the real meaning of the phrase "A Nation in Arms." Such, my Lords and gentlemen, was Lord Haldane's language in September, 1906--less than six years ago. Might it not be imagined that he was speaking as President of the National Service League, addressing a meeting such as I am addressing to-day? Nor can it be denied that, in his subsequent description of the functions to be fulfilled by the Forces which he has substituted for the Volunteers, Lord Haldane has correctly kept in view the relationship which ought to exist between the branches and the trunk, between the Navy and the Regular nucleus on the one hand, and the "National Army lying behind" them on the other. In his Memorandum on the Army Estimates for 1908-09, when the Territorial Force was created, Lord Haldane said that it was "designed-- "1. To compel any hostile Power which may attempt invasion to send a force so large that its transports could not evade our own fleets and flotillas. "2. To free the Regular Army from the necessity of remaining in these islands to fulfil the functions of Home Defence.