The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. SATURDAY, JANUARY 9, 1915. LESSONS OF THE WAR.
The lessons of the war after three mouths fighting were most interestingly discussed in the London News and Leader early in November. Amongst other conclusions arrived at of German folly—and worse—was that political miscalculation, and the writer reminds us that Germany began the war fortified with the most amazing delusions about the world. They were the delusions of a bookish and unimaginative people who laboriously study the facts, but miss the meaning. Take the delusion in regard to the British Empire. It was believed that England would not fight because she would be engaged in a revolutionary I Struggle at home. It was believed j that if she did fight her Empire would ( collapse like a house of cards. She was ( a decadent nation, because militarism was not her faith, because she trifled.
with the Carson campaign, because .she, allowed the suffragettes to play wildj tricks and did not suppress them with a ruthless hand, because she gave sellV government to South Africa and so, on. All this was the mark of weakness —the mark or a dying people feebly grasping the sceptre of dominion. It wsa a fatal miscalculation. What the Prussian mind—with its incomparable knowledge of facts and its incomparable ignorance of human nature—took for, weakness was Britain’s impregnable strength. The Prussian mind could'not grasp the idea of English liberty. It is that principle of liberty which has made the whole Empire rise with such passion to this great argument. The Kaiser has not destroyed the Empire:
he has established it. He'has made it realise as it never realised before its deep and abiding unity, its lofty spiritual meaning, its great gospel of freedom.
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Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXV, Issue 7, 9 January 1915, Page 4
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295The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. SATURDAY, JANUARY 9, 1915. LESSONS OF THE WAR. Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXV, Issue 7, 9 January 1915, Page 4
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