that lies across the mouths of the Rhine, and guards the access to all
the ports of northern Europe. In this island we have had enough safety
and enough leisure to develop for ourselves a system of constitutional
and individual liberty which has had an enormous influence on other
nations. It has been admired and imitated; it has also been hated and
attacked. To the majority of European statesmen and politicians it has
been merely unintelligible. Some of them have regarded it with a kind
of superstitious reverence; for we have been very successful in the
world at large, and how could so foolish and ineffective a system
achieve success except by adventitious aid? Others, including all the
statesmen and political theorists who prepared Germany for this War,
have refused to admire; the power of England, they have taught, is not
real power; she has been crafty and lucky; she has kept herself free
from the entanglements and strifes of the Continent, and has enriched
herself by filching the property of the combatants. If once she were
compelled to hold by force what she won by guile, her pretensions would
collapse, and she would fall back into her natural position as a small
agricultural island, inhabited by a people whose proudest boast would
then be that they are poor cousins of the Germans.

It is difficult to discuss this question with German professors and
politicians: they have such simple minds, and they talk like angry
children. Their opinions concerning England are not original; their
views were held with equal fervour and expressed in very similar
language by Philip of Spain in the sixteenth century, by Louis XIV of
France in the seventeenth century, and by Napoleon at the close of the
eighteenth century. 'These all died in faith, not having received the
promises, but having seen them afar off.' I will ask you to consider the
attack made upon England by each of these three powerful rulers.