These are the reasons why, quite deliberately, on the way home from Rapallo, on November 12th, 1917, Mr. Lloyd George made that remarkable speech at Paris which was perhaps the frankest utterance of the war.[112] This Paris speech fluttered all the dovecots of Europe, and some of the eagles’ nests as well. It seemed to come as a caprice, a child of sudden impulse, from the brain of the British Premier. And yet the speech was most carefully prepared; a copy of it was sent to the War Cabinet in time for correction in case of need; it was handed over for interpretation before being uttered.[113] There was nothing sudden about it. For the speech represented the slowly matured results of two years of observation, the fruits of prolonged meditation on the events of the war. The step towards unity which was the central point of the speech represented his profoundest conviction on the strategy of the war. Ever since the beginning of the war, indeed, Mr. Lloyd George had been an international as well as a patriot. As in the war itself, so in the Alliances, he was always against half-measures. If we were to be true Allies of France and Russia—or later on of Italy and the United States—then we must always work with them hand in hand, take close counsel with them as friends, act always together, not as separate States but as parts of one common organisation; the real beginning of a new “League of Nations.” From the very outset he had no use for national sectarianism; he could not understand the idea of a tepid alliance, a Laodicean friendship, timorous of mutual help, suspicious of common counsel, feeble in reciprocal aid. His reading of history had taught him that this kind of suspicion, especially strong in island countries, had been the sleeping sickness, the wasting paralysis, of all former mixed European Alliances. It was just this same aloofness, this same separatist pursuit of national aims, that robbed Marlborough of the fruits of his victories. It was precisely the same want of common planning that melted all Pitt’s alliances like wax before the fire of Napoleon’s energy. In more recent days, it was the similar want of understanding between the British and French Generals that prolonged the Crimean War. Now he determined to strike while the iron was white hot. The fire burned, and he spake with his tongue. While the events in Italy were still fresh in the memory of Europe he pointed the lesson in vivid and biting language. It was certainly the first time that such a speech had been uttered at such a half-private function—an official luncheon of the Premiers arranged to give him an interval of relaxation in his journey back to England. No wonder the orthodox were alarmed. Frankly and roughly, like a man in a hurry who has no time for honeyed speech, Mr. Lloyd George gave to the world his own innermost reasons for pressing forward the machinery of central control.