L. S. Amery

“ It is essential that we should get rid of this vicious attitude of mind, and endeavour to realize that not only our naval and military preparations, but our foreign and domestic policy, our political and social customs, our industries, the distribution of our territories, of our population, and of our trade, all have their defence aspect, and form part of the general problem of defence. It is no less essential, of course, to recognise the converse of this assertion. We must remember that defence has no purpose and no meaning apart from the other aspects of national life. ”

“ The object of defence is to preserve our territories, to protect the growth of our material wealth, and, still more important, to secure the maintenance and development of our social and political well-being, of our national traditions, and of our national character. The truth is that between the different factors of national life it is impossible to draw hard and fast partitions. Each is continually interacting upon the other. The territory and wealth that need to be defended are, from another point of view, but the instruments with which defence is carried on. ”

“ The United States are our friends—and long may they continue to remain so—but they have not always been so in the past, and there is no guarantee that they will remain our friends for ever. So vital is naval supremacy to us that we cannot tolerate any nation or pair of nations, however friendly at the moment, being stronger than ourselves at sea. Once we allow that to happen, the whole framework on which our Empire is built will fall to pieces. ”

“ Our army system, on the other hand, is inherently inefficient, because it has never really formed a part of the national life, because the ordinary citizen, or the ordinary politician, has no idea of the purpose for which he wants an army, or of what constitutes military efficiency. It is from that lack of national interest and national understanding that all the defects of our military system flow. An indifferent nation means an indifferent Parliament, and an indifferent Parliament means an indifferent Cabinet, and an indifferent Prime Minister. ”

“ The defence of India will require something much more powerful than Mr. Arnold-Forster's short-service reserve army. We require something in the nature of an Imperial militia, an organization that will enable us to put a really large and effective force, reckoned not in tens, but in hundreds of thousands, into the field in front of India, and to maintain and increase that force during a long war. How that force is to be raised and trained, and now it is to be paid for, is a problem that presents the very gravest difficulties. At the same time, it is a problem which must be faced. ”

“ The defence of an Empire whose parts are divided by the sea demands first and foremost a supreme navy. That supremacy is more essential than ever, now that the outlying parts of the Empire are regarded not as dependencies, but as integral portions whose maintenance is essential to the existence of the whole. On the other hand, the oversea possessions of the other Powers are only dependencies in the sense that the British Colonies once were, and not integral portions of themselves, and for that very reason the loss of naval supremacy means more to us than to any of them. ”

“ Gradually, however, a measure of internal and external equilibrium was arrived at, and was followed by a stage of rapid economic development. Prussia, pursuing a policy in its spirit closely akin to that of England in the eighteenth century, made defence—through education, through efficiency of administration, and through the fostering of industry—subserve the purposes of national development, and in the last generation has reaped the fruits of her policy in an expansion of national strength, with which our expansion in recent times can bear no comparison. ”

“ Ultimately, too, the political evolution of India will be necessary in order to enable her fully to carry out her part in defending her own frontiers. Nothing would be more unwise than to attempt suddenly to introduce the English political system into India—to adopt the panaceas of the Indian National Congress. At the same time, things cannot remain for ever as they are now, if, for no other reason, simply because a state governed and administered on the lines of the India of to-day cannot hold its own militarily against states in a higher condition of political development. ”

“ The Imperial unity necessary for defence will quicken our whole political and social life. The fostering of trade within the Empire, and the building up of population in the Colonies, will in the end mean not a mere diversion of the total wealth and population of the Empire, but an enormous aggregate increase. National service will not only provide the reserve for our armies, and increase the efficiency of the voluntary armies raised in the midst of a warlike nation, but it will benefit us in innumerable other ways. ”

“ With all these States industrial development has led to the desire to control markets and the sources of raw materials—in other words, to a policy of expansion. That same industrial development has provided them with the wealth which makes that expansion possible, which enables them to maintain great armies and build great fleets. We have gradually come back to the situation of two centuries ago; only now what is threatened is, not so much England as the British Empire as a whole, and England herself mainly in so far as she is dependent on the Empire and on her trade for holding her own. ”

“ There is only one way out of the difficulty—that is, to find the material basis of our defence policy, not in the United Kingdom, but in the British Empire. At present that Empire is unorganized and undeveloped; but if we can unite its scattered components, and develop its vast territories and immense natural resources, then we may hope to build up an industrial power, and to create a population fully capable of providing for the needs of Imperial policy without fainting beneath the burden. ”

“ Whence are we to raise the revenue, and where to find the population to maintain them? It is perfectly clear that in the long-run the United Kingdom, which maintains the whole burden of our present very inadequate defence, will be unable to meet these larger demands. As an industrial unit, the United Kingdom has long ago been outstripped by the United States. It is at this moment being outstripped by Germany, and may even, in a future not so very remote, be outstripped by Russia and Japan. ”

“ Russia, too, is gradually becoming a modern State, and though internal misgovernment and disastrous wars abroad may retard, yet they cannot in the long-run check her economic development, or the growth of her power. The United States after a long period, during which all its energies were turned inwards, are now looking without, and entering into the competition of the world not only as an industrial, but also as a military and naval power. ”

“ The desire to secure the control of the raw materials of those industries, and to develop new and sure markets for their products, led to the acquisition of our Colonial Empire, and stimulated its development. It has often been said that the British Empire sprang up unconsciously, as a result of British trade, that our defence policy was based on our trade interests, and that our wars were the outcome of trade disputes. But it is at least equally true that British trade and the British Empire were created for the sake of national defence. ”

“ Some form of national service is essential to national military efficiency, quite apart from the length of the training given, and from the direct usefulness of the army thus created. Given a nation in which every citizen possesses a certain proficiency in the use of arms, and is accustomed to the idea that it is his duty, if need be, to sacrifice even his life for the public good, and it will be possible to raise an economical and efficient voluntary army in peace, and to furnish a boundless reserve in time of war. ”

“ Whatever naval programme they fix upon, we have got to surpass. If their naval budgets rise to fifty millions, we shall have to follow suit; and if they raise them again to sixty, seventy, or eighty millions, we still can do nothing else but follow. But in a competition of this sort with States growing so enormously in industrial strength, and established on so broad a basis of territory and population, we cannot hope in the long-run to succeed. The burden will press more and more heavily on our narrower shoulders, and sooner or later we shall come to grief. ”

“ No 'blue water' doctrinarianism, no theory of passive military defence, blinded them to the great fact that wars to be fought successfully must be fought offensively, and cannot be confined to one element alone. The intimate interaction of naval and military warfare in England's wars is often obscured from us by the fact that most of the work on land was done by our allies. Skilful foreign policy, helped by liberal subventions, enabled us to get the heavy and comparatively unprofitable work of continental fighting done for us. ”

“ The population of the United States was, to a large extent, stimulated by the overflow from this country, and was actually built up in America itself by the sustaining power of the British market. That population was lost immediately as far as defence was concerned, and was gradually lost for economic purposes as well, as it began to learn to manufacture for itself, and refused to keep its market open to British goods. It is no exaggeration to say that we lost a greater colonial empire to the United States in the nineteenth century than we did in the eighteenth. ”

“ In the first place, a purely naval war cannot crush a continental enemy. It may be prolonged indefinitely, and cost enormous sums, which will cripple the whole power of the nation, and thus in the long-run endanger naval supremacy itself, for naval supremacy must be based on national wealth. Moreover, even to purely naval success, military success is sometimes an essential factor. Without the army which captured Port Arthur, the Japanese would have found it more difficult to establish their naval supremacy in the Far East. ”

“ Our foreign policy is still to a very large extent English rather than Imperial. The trade interests of England bulk in it much more largely than those of other parts of the Empire. The defence of those interests continually brings the Imperial Power into strained relations with other Powers. Those strained relations may involve the whole Empire in wars in which great parts of the Empire have had no interest. No doubt the Imperial forces would defend India and the Colonies from harm during such a war ”

“ When our economic system has so developed that it will be impossible, in most cases, for an outside Power to interfere with English interests without at the same time interfering with Colonial or Indian interests, then we may hope to enlist the serious and permanent attention of the Colonies in the problems of Imperial Defence. What applies to the general policy of the Foreign Office applies no less to the details of its departmental work. ”

“ To use the industrial metaphor, we should have kept the military industry within our own borders. The hired foreign armies were not available everywhere or always, and the military skill evoked by the great struggles on the Continent did not inure to our benefit. It was the neglect of our army, the reckless cutting down after the Seven Years' War, that was the prime cause of the loss of the American Colonies. ”

“ The political and social freedom and stability which we prize, and for the sake of which our State is most worth defending, are, at the same time, the most effective means of securing the frill development of national power in time of war. ”

“ New external conditions and new internal developments necessarily altered the whole national attitude towards the problem of defence. We had emerged from a great war in complete command of the sea. No other nation seriously thought of disputing our naval supremacy. The security of our oversea trade, the possession of the oversea Empire we had won, and the power of expanding it indefinitely, followed as a matter of course. Our industry was full of strength and vitality. ”

“ Under such circumstances the Secretary of State for War is usually a nonentity, or, if not, he wears himself out by his vain efforts to force through his schemes against the passive obstruction of his colleagues and the indifference of the nation. Behind the Secretary of State there stands the War Office disorganized and emasculated by the hopelessness of ever getting anything done, or ever finding out what it is wanted to do, and from the War Office hopelessness and indifference spread throughout the army. ”

“ In the meantime, we can do something by keeping as large a proportion as possible of our regular army in those Colonies, though that can only be regarded as a temporary measure. Lastly, India herself must also be enabled to play her part more adequately in her own defence. The economic development of India, the building up of a great industrial community on the basis of the present purely agricultural India, is an essential element in Imperial Defence, and no considerations of the selfish interest of the English export trade can be allowed to stand in the way of that development. ”

“ The maintenance of the two-Power standard is, perhaps, the very lowest measure that we can allow ourselves. Our navy is our very existence. We can allow no State, or pair of States, however seemingly well-disposed, to outbuild us at sea. ”