Page:Great Speeches of the War.djvu/314

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
278
Rt, Hon. Lewis Harcourt'

duce, volunteers, even aeroplanes. The catalogue is so extensive that it is impossible to recapitulate. Nor must I omit the Falkland Islands, who have contributed a sum of money amounting to £2 per head of the entire population—[cheers]—at a moment when they were in imminent danger of capture by German cruisers.

With the capture of Togoland, where the Germans had the largest wireless telegraph station in the world, in direct communication with Berlin; the Cameroons expedition, which is still in progress, although more than half the business is already done; and the operations against German East Africa, which have proved—as it was always expected that it would—a tough proposition;—if you could see my daily and nightly sheaves of telegrams, the despatches, the letters from the tropical firing-line, you would live, as I have done for six months, in the thrills and the romance of thinly defended frontiers, of gallantly captured posts, of conquest and reverse, of strategy and organization. And from what, think you, does all this unity of purpose, of action, and of sentiment spring? From the genius of the British race for self-government and good government. [Hear, hear.] We have given freely, proudly, the most complete autonomy to our great White Dominions, and we have reaped a rich harvest. Canada in the past. South Africa in the present, are witnesses to the fact that confidence is its own reward. [Hear, hear.] But in those great tropical territories, where autonomy was not yet advisable or possible, we have endeavoured—and with success—to govern by and through and with the sentiments and customs of the inhabitants. [Hear, hear.] A wide tolerance, with no too emphatic insistence on "culture"—[laughter and cheers]—has created a cosmopolitan confidence which has proved in action a good substitute for the subservience of militarism. [Cheers.]