Gentlemen, I am, I trust, doing no wrong to the memory of these statesmen when I point out that in the very years--nay, in the very months--that they were cherishing these illusions of peace and universal disarmament, in those very months the mightiest and most disciplined force that this earth has ever contained was silently being drilled in that wide region from the Rhine to the Elbe and the Oder, and from the North Sea to the Bavarian frontier, until, the right hour having struck, that army disclosed itself in all its prodigious and crushing mass and in all its unmatched capacity for destruction and war. And, amid those auspicious dreams of peace, for what was that army being trained? Koeniggrätz, Metz, St. Privat, and Sedan are the answer. Nor did that army pause until upon the ruins of the Empire of the third Napoleon--upon the ruins, I may say, of France, unprepared in peace, and in war scattered and dismayed--it had reared a new Empire, the Empire of William I., of Frederick I., and of William II., for whose personal character, noble and imaginative patriotism, and capacities as a ruler, I yield to no man in my admiration. Such, gentlemen, was history's ironic comment upon John Bright's and Richard Cobden's eloquently-urged enthusiasm. Let me not increase by any word of mine the crushing weight of Destiny's criticism. Now, gentlemen, at the present day, now in the year 1912, our German friends, I am well aware, do not, at least in sensible circles, assert dogmatically that a war with Great Britain will take place this year or next; but in their heart of hearts they know, every man of them,[3] that, just as in 1866 and just as in 1870, war will take place the instant the German forces by land and sea are, by their superiority at every point, as certain of victory as anything in human calculation can be made certain. "Germany strikes when Germany's hour has struck." That is the time-honoured policy of her Foreign Office. That was the policy relentlessly pursued by Bismarck and Moltke in 1866 and 1870; it has been her policy decade by decade since that date; it is her policy at the present hour. And, gentlemen, it is an excellent policy. It is, or should be, the policy of every nation prepared to play a great part in history. Under that policy Germany has, within the last ten years, sprung, as at a bound, from one of the weakest of naval Powers to the greatest naval Power, save one, upon this globe. But yesterday, so to speak, the British Fleets did not feel the furrow of a German war-keel on the wide seas. To-day every British warship and every British merchant vessel thrills in all her iron nerves to that mighty presence. Just as in 1866, by the massing of her armies towards this frontier or towards that frontier, Prussia controlled the action of Austria, so Germany constrains the action of England at the present day. Do you wish for proofs? I point to the gradual displacement of