David Lloyd George Quotes

Take Article 12 of this Covenant: "The Members of the League"—which means the nations of the earth—"agree that if there should arise between them any dispute likely to lead to a rupture, they will submit the matter either to arbitration or to inquiry." ... Supposing that had been in existence in 1914, it would have been difficult for Germany and Austria to have gone to War. They could not have done it, and, if they had, America would have been in on the first day, not three years afterwards, which would have...made all the difference. You could not have had the War in 1914 had the League of Nations been in existence. With this machinery I am not going to say you will never have war. Man is a savage animal. ... If it avert one war, the League of Nations will have justified itself. If you let one generation pass without the blood of millions being spilt, and without the agony which fills so many homes, the League of Nations will have been justified. I beg no one to sneer at the League of Nations. Let us try it. I believe it will succeed in stopping something. It may not stop everything. The world has gone from war to war, until at last we have despaired of stopping it. But society with all its organisations has not stopped every crime. What it does is that it makes crime difficult or unsuccessful, and that is what the League of Nations will do. Therefore I look to it with hope and with confidence.

I come to the last and the greatest guarantee of all—that is, the League of Nations. ... [This] great and hopeful experiment is only rendered possible by the other conditions. ... Without disarmament, without the indication which this War has given that the nations of the world are determined at all costs to enforce respect for treaties, the League of Nations would be just like other Conventions in the past—something that would be blown away by the first gust of war or of any fierce dispute between the nations. It is this War, it is the Treaty that concludes this War, which will make the League of Nations possible. ... There are many things the world has realised and is prepared to take into account and to provide against. This League of Nations is an attempt to do it by some less barbarous methods than war. Let us try it. I beg this country to try it seriously, and to try it in earnest. It is due to mankind that we should try it. Anything except the horror of the last four and a half years!

[T]he League of Nations will be of no value unless it has behind it the sanction of strong nations, prepared at a moment's notice to stop aggression. Otherwise the League of Nations will be a scrap of paper.

We were determined, at any rate, that this Treaty should not be a scrap of paper. What are the guarantees? The first is the disarmament of Germany. The German Army was the foundation and corner stone of Prussian policy. You had to scatter it, disperse it, disarm it—to make it impossible for it to come together again, to make it impossible to equip such an army. ... Those who have read the Treaty know the steps we have taken to make it impossible for Germany to have great factories and arsenals which at any moment she could turn on for the equipment of a great force. ... We, therefore, regard the disarmament of Germany—the reduction of her army, the destruction of her arsenals, the taking away of her guns—as one of the foremost guarantees for peace which you could exact in the Treaty.

Is it unjust that we should, in our economic terms, make it clear that Germany is not to take advantage of wanton destruction of the trade machinery of her rivals in Belgium and in France, in order to get ahead in the competitive race for business? Money does not put that right. You cannot get machinery in a year or, perhaps, two years, and meanwhile Germany, which has never been devastated, would be going a head. We had to put in clauses for protection against that. What injustice is there in that?

[P]unishment for offences against the laws of war. There is a longer category than the House may imagine. Some of them are incredible—I could not have believed it had it not been that the evidence was overwhelming. I should not have thought any nation with a pretence to civilisation could have committed such atrocities. I am not going into the categories, and I should not care to enumerate them, but they ought to be punished. Officers who are guilty of these things in a moment of arrogance, feeling that their power to do what they please is irresistible, ought to know in future that they will be held personally responsible. War is horrible enough without committing these unlicensed infamies upon rules which are quite cruel enough as they are. ... They will get fair play, and they have no right to more. What injustice is there in that? What undue harshness is there in it? It is the averting of it, and making it impossible for the future.

Having regard to the use which Germany made of her great army, is there anything unjust in scattering that army, disarming it, making it incapable of repeating the injury which it has inflicted upon the world?

I come now to the question of reparation. Are the terms we have imposed unjust to Germany? If the whole cost of the War, all the costs incurred by every country that has been forced into war by the action of Germany, had been thrown upon Germany, it would have been in accord with every principle of civilised jurisprudence in the world. There was but one limit to the justice and the wisdom of the reparation we claimed, and that was the limit of Germany's capacity to pay. ... Is there anything unjust in imposing upon Germany those payments? I do not believe anyone could claim it to be unjust. Certainly no one could claim that it was unjust unless he believed that the justice of the War was on the side of Germany.

I ask anyone to point to any territorial change we made in respect to Germany in Europe which is in the least an injustice, judged by any principle of fairness.

In so far as territories have been taken away from Germany, it is a restoration. Alsace-Lorraine—forcibly taken away from the land to which its population were deeply attached. Is it an injustice to restore them to their country? Schleswig-Holstein—the meanest of the Hohenzollern frauds; robbing a poor, small, helpless country, with a pretence that you are not doing it, and then retaining that land against the wishes of the population for fifty or sixty years. I am glad the opportunity has come for restoring Schleswig-Holstein. Poland—torn to bits, to feed the carnivorous greed of Russian, Austrian, and Prussian autocracy. This Treaty has re-knit the torn flag of Poland, which is now waving over a free and a united people; and it will have to be defended, not merely with gallantry, but with wisdom. For Poland is indeed in a perilous position, between a Germany shorn of her prey and an unknown Russia which has not yet emerged. All these territorial adjustments of which we have heard are restorations. Take Danzig—a free city, forcibly incorporated in the Kingdom of Prussia. They are all territories that ought not to belong to Germany, and they are now restored to the independence of which they have been deprived by Prussian aggression.

Those insolent Germans made me very angry yesterday. I don't know when I have been more angry. Their conduct showed that the old German is still there. Your Brockdorff-Rantzaus will ruin Germany's chances of reconstruction. But the strange thing is that the Americans and ourselves felt more angry than the French and Italians. I asked old Clemenceau why. He said, "Because we are accustomed to their insolence. We have had to bear it for fifty years. It is new to you and therefore it makes you angry".

I had to tell him quite plainly that the Belgians had lost only 16,000 men in the war, and that, when all was said, Belgium had not made greater sacrifices than Great Britain. The truth is that we are always called upon to foot the bill. When anything has to be done it is "Old England" that has to do it. If the Rumanians have to be supplied with food and credits have to be given, in the final result England has to stand the racket. It is time that we again told the world what we have done. These things tend to be forgotten. Our policy is quite clear but imperfectly understood. We mean that the French shall have coal in the Saar Valley and that the Poles shall have access to the sea through Danzig; but we don't want to create a condition of affairs that will be likely to lead to another war. We don't want to place millions of Germans under the domination of the French and the Poles. That would not be for their benefit, and what is the use of setting up a lot of Alsace-Lorraines?

The truth is that we have got our way. We have got most of the things we set out to get. If you had told the British people twelve months ago that they would have secured what they have, they would have laughed you to scorn. The German Navy has been handed over; the German mercantile shipping has been handed over, and the German colonies have been given up. One of our chief trade competitors has been most seriously crippled and our Allies are about to become her biggest creditors. That is no small achievement. In addition, we have destroyed the menace to our Indian possessions.

We must make, if we can, an enduring peace. That is why I feel so strongly regarding the proposal to hand over two million Germans to the Poles, who are an inferior people so far as concerns the experience and capacity for government. We do not want to create another Alsace-Lorraine.

I am making a good fight for the old country & there is no one but me who could do it.