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" "As far as the forces of the Crown are concerned, we are ready. I believe the Prime Minister and my right honorable friend, the First Lord of the Admiralty, have no doubt what ever that the readiness and the efficiency of those forces were never at a higher mark than they are today, and never was there a time when our confidence was more justified in the power of the Navy to protect our commerce and to protect our shores. The thought is with us always of the suffer and misery entailed, from which no country in Europe will escape by abstention, and from which no neutrality will save us. The amount of harm that must be done by an enemy ship to our trade is infinitesimal, compared with the amount of harm that must be done by the economic condition that is caused on the Continent.
Sir Edward Grey, 3rd Bt., 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon (25 April 1862 – 7 September 1933) was British Foreign Secretary from 1905 to 1916.
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[O]ur friendship with France and Russia is in itself a guarantee that neither of them will pursue a provocative or aggressive policy towards Germany, who is their neighbour and ours. Any support we would give France and Russia in times of trouble would depend entirely on the feeling of Parliament and public feeling here when the trouble came, and both France and Russia know perfectly well that British public opinion would not give support to provocative or aggressive action against Germany.
And what is the German programme as we gather it from the speech of the Chancellor and public utterances in Germany now? Germany to control the destiny of all other nations; to be "the shield of peace and freedom of big and small nations," those are the Chancellor's words; an iron peace and a freedom under a Prussian shield and under German supremacy. Germany supreme, Germany alone would be free: free to break international treaties; free to crush when it pleased her; free to refuse all mediation; free to go to war when it suited her; free, when she did go to war, to break again all rules of civilisation and humanity on land and at sea... Germany is to be supreme. The freedom of other nations is to be that which Germany metes out to them. Such is apparently the conclusion to be drawn from the German Chancellor's speech.