[W]e have ever in our minds what our easy-going fellow-countrymen are so apt to forget—that an unceasing and desperate struggle for existence—nation … - F. S. Oliver

If a country will not stand up for its rights it must certainly lose them. The spirit of giving in is the most fatal disease to which nations are subject, and it is apt to attack them, like cancer, when they have arrived at the meridian. Jingoism itself is less fatal than the appeal on all occasions to material scales, in order to decide whether the injury that threatens the country is likely to be less or greater than the sacrifices that may be needed to prevent it. Concessions to unjust or impudent demands have a formidable knack of breeding. The nation that submits from laziness or fear, or because it is too short-sighted to detect the specious fallacies of arithmetic, will certainly lose its own confidence and the respect of its neighbours; and these two things are the very foundations of national prosperity.

The only two men who really seem to understand that we are at war are Winston and Lloyd George. Both have faults which disgust one peculiarly at the present time, but there is a reality about them and they are in earnest, which the others aren't.

It was impossible, in Hamilton's view, for a nation to act towards other nations as a man of warm feelings would act towards his neighbours. A nation cannot afford to indulge itself in hatred or affection, magnanimity or revenge. In deciding upon its course of action, sentiment is as irrelevant a consideration as malice, and wars of chivalry are as iniquitous as wars of religion. The statesman who bends to an emotional outburst of public opinion as richly deserves to be shot as a general who surrenders a city out of compassion for the inhabitants. The stern test of the righteousness of a war is the permanent security of the state. A government which goes knight-erranting out of sympathy for foreign nations is like a trustee who subscribes to charities out of the property he has undertaken to administer. A government, like a trustee, is responsible for the estate. Its business is sound investments, not the encouragement of deserving institutions or the succour of honest, poor men overwhelmed by adversity. Pity and prejudice are equally out of place when ministers, in whom king or people has placed the serious confidence of decision, come to determine the tremendous issues of alliances and wars.