There was no treaty then or at any other time. Each
Government left its own Parliament, and therefore its own People, whose
servant it was, to decide freely when the time came. But the men at
the head of the French and British fleets and armies arranged, year by
year, what they would do when they got the word _GO_! At the same time
(six years before the war) that the Prime Ministers were in conference
in Paris Lord Haldane, then Secretary of State for War, was warning
Lord French in London that he would be expected to command the British
army against the Germans in France, and that he had better begin to
study the problem at once.
A great deal of sickening nonsense has been talked about our having
been so "righteous" because so "unprepared." We were not prepared to
_attack_ anybody; and quite rightly too; though we need not get
self-righteous over it. But our great Mother Country's Navy was most
certainly and most rightly prepared to _defend_ the Empire and its
allies against the attack that was bound to come. If France and Great
Britain had not been well enough prepared for self-defence, then the
Germans must have won; and wrong would have triumphed over right all
over the world.
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