Excerpts from a Leader's speech delivered in Manchester in 1918 - H. H. Asquith

[T]his long and sombre procession of cruelty and suffering, lighted up as it is by deathless examples of heroism and chivalry, cannot be allowed to end in some patched-up, precarious, dishonouring compromise, masquerading under the name of Peace. No one desires to prolong for a single unnecessary day the tragic spectacle of bloodshed and destruction, but we owe it to those who have given their lives for us, the flower of our youth, the hope and promise of our future, that their supreme sacrifice shall not have been in vain. The ends of the Allies are well known; they have been frequently and precisely stated. They are not selfish ends, they are not vindictive ends, but they require that there shall be adequate reparation for the past and adequate security for the future. On their achievement we in this country honestly believe depends the best hopes of humanity.

[T]he rise of Germany into the front rank of the commercial Powers of the world was the most remarkable illustration that was to be found of the practical value of education, organization, and concentration. ... Any man who read the accounts of what was done and provided in France, Germany, Belgium, Austria, and, above all, the United States of America, and contrasted the magnificent educational apparatus in which the humblest boy in those countries might aspire to be a participant with our own scanty, slovenly, unscientific, and ill-organized system, or want of system, would no longer be at a loss to understand why England was handicapped in the race for commercial supremacy.

In 1851 Harriet Martineau had just published a...History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace. The Great Exhibition of 1851...was about to open its doors and inaugurate what many people regarded as a new era of international concord. Industry was to be the recruiting sergeant of the future, and war, with its unproductive expenditure, with its futile hatreds and animosities, was to be superseded by the bloodless revolution of free competitors in the open markets of the world. For success in that new and pacific international struggle no nation was so well equipped as our own. We started with enormous advantages. Fifty years had passed. How did we stand to-day? The civilized world, which in 1851 seemed to be in the mood to send in its swords to be beaten into ploughshares, was now transformed into an armed camp; the 30 years' peace which Miss Martineau described had been succeeded by 50 years of almost continuous war.