A GREAT SPEECH.

Gisborne Times, Volume VI, Issue 167, 26 July 1901, Page 2

A GREAT SPEECH.

The London Times report of Winston Churchill’s speech against the Salisbury Government’s scheme for enlarging the British Army makes it easy to understand the sensation it produced. It has Ijeen called “ the best speech made in Parliament since Gladstone.” That may bo over-praise, but it certainly was a most keen and effective arraignment of tho Government’s policy. Why divide tho £60,000,000 a year England is to spend for war purposes between the navy and tho army ? asked Churchill. “ The British Empire did not and could never depend on the army,” and with popular newspapers almost daily “ urging us into war against one or other of the great powers of Europe we ought not to make it so easy and attractive to embark on these terrible enterprises.” He spoke of the army-enlargement proposals as “symptoms of military hydrophobia,” and he poured unsparing ridicule upon the idea that three army corps would put England in any better position than at presont. They woidd not be adequate to meet a Eussian invasion of India. They would not have been half enough to meet even the Boers. And if, he added, “such a fit of madness as war with the United States were ever to overtake the Anglo-Saxon family,” “three army corps would be only as the first drops of the thunder-shower.” Of what use would the three corps be, asked Churchill, against the groat European armies ? And yet they would cost more than Germany’s or France’s armed hosts. It was, he declared, “ a vain competition with the clanking military empires of the Continent.” Reaching his highest argument last, with the instinct of the best parliamentary debaters, he spoke of the “ moral force behind nations,” declared that England had better keep her reputation as a country “ whose influence throughout the world was upon the whole healthy and kindly,” than exchange it “ for the sake of the trumpery and dangerous military playthings on which the Secretary for War had set his heart.”

It was a speech which took the Commons and the country alike by surprise, and revealed a new man of large possibilities and an unsuspected appreciation of the new man’s antijingo ideas.