But, my Lord Mayor, Germany was guilty of another and a still more capital blunder in relation to ourselves. ["Hear, hear!"] I am not referring for the moment to the grotesque understanding upon which I dwelt a week ago at Edinburgh, their carefully fostered belief that we here were so rent with civil distraction, [laughter,] so paralyzed by luke-warmness or disaffection in our dominions and dependencies, that if it came to fighting we might be brushed aside as an impotent and even a negligible factor. [Cheers and cries of "Never!"] The German misconception went even deeper than that. They asked themselves what interest, direct or material, had the United Kingdom in this conflict? Could any nation, least of all the cold, calculating, phlegmatic, egotistic British nation, [laughter,] embark upon a costly and bloody contest from which it had nothing in the hope of profit to expect? ["Hear, hear!"] They forgot--they forgot that we, like the Belgians, had something at stake which cannot be translated into what one of our poets has called "The law of nicely calculated less or more." What was it we had at stake? First and foremost, the fulfillment to the small and relatively weak country of our plighted word [cheers] and behind and beyond that the maintenance of the whole system of international good-will which is the moral bond of the civilized world. [Cheers.] Here again they were wrong in thinking that the reign of ideas, Old World ideas like those of duty and good faith, had been superseded by the ascendency of force. My Lord Mayor, war is at all times a hideous thing; at the best an evil to be chosen in preference to worse evils, and at the worst little better than the letting loose of hell upon earth. The prophet of old spoke of the "confused noise of battle and the garments rolled in blood," but in these modern days, with the gigantic scale of the opposing armies and the scientific developments of the instruments of destruction, war has become an infinitely more devastating thing than it ever was before. The hope that the general recognition of a humaner code would soften or abate some of its worst brutalities has been rudely dispelled by the events of the last few weeks. ["Shame!"] Shameful and Cynical Desecration.