Never Give In! Read Online Free PDF Page B

off now, but Governments were never more stable and secure. I think the late Lord Randolph Churchill one of the last of the old school of politicians. . . . Nothing would be worse than that independent men should be snuffed out and that there should be only two opinions in England – the Government opinion and the Opposition opinion. The perpetually unanimous Cabinet disquiets me. I believe in personality. The House of Commons depends for its popularity, and consequently for its power, on the personality of its members.
    We live in an age of great events and little men, and if we are not to become the slaves of our own systems or sink oppressed among the mechanism we ourselves created, it will only be by the bold efforts of originality, by repeated experiment, and by the dispassionate consideration of the results of sustained and unflinching thought.
    ‘A NAVY . . . STRONG ENOUGH TO PRESERVE THE PEACE OF THE WORLD’
    17 January 1903
    Oldham, Lancashire
    The young Member for Oldham renews his attack on ‘Mr Brodrick’s Army’.
    The failure of this Army scheme is a very serious business, and it is a matter which Parliament will have to discuss. We have frittered away money. We have wasted time. Above all, we have exhausted that public interest in the Army which the war had excited, and which might have been made the driving power of great and beneficial and sorely needed reforms. But there is one consolation, though it is, perhaps, rather a grim consolation. It was a scheme all along unsuited to our needs; it never ought to have succeeded; it never could have succeeded. From the very beginning it deserved opposition, and was doomed to failure. We did not want to have in England three army corps or soldiers to sail away and attack anybody anywhere at a moment’s notice. That is a dangerous and provocative provision. That is enough men to get us into trouble with a great European nation, and nothing like enough men to get us out again. ( Hear, hear. ) We do not want to have in England a large Regular Army for home defence. We do not want our Volunteers to remain a mere despised appendage of the War Office. ( Cheers. ) There is scarcely anything more harmful to the British Army than this perpetual imitation of the German system ( hear , hear ), of German uniforms, and of methods. Sometimes I think the whole Cabinet has got a touch of German measles ( laughter ), but Mr Brodrick’s case is much the worst. He is spotted from head to foot ( laughter ), and he has communicated the contagion to the Army.
    Perhaps you would say to me, ‘You are very ready to tell us what kind of an Army we do not want, but will you tell us what kind of an army we do?’ Well, it is almost impossible for any one who has not got access to the machinery and knowledge of a great Department to make detailed positive propositions on such a very complicated question, but after what I have said I feel I ought to put forward some suggestions of a constructive character. First of all, the British Regular Army of the future would have to be, nearly all of it, serving abroad in the great garrisons of the Empire – India, Egypt, South Africa, and in the various fortresses and coaling stations which are so necessary to us; and for this reason we would only be able to have a very small Regular Army at home. It ought to be a very good Army ( hear, hear ) – perhaps much better paid and, I hope, better trained than at present; but, still, it could only be a very small Army – an Army big enough to send an expedition to fight the Mahdi or the Mad Mullah, and just the kind of Army to do that sort of thing very well, but not big enough to fight the Russians or the Germans or the French. Then we would have to entrust the defence of the soil of England from a foreign invasion to a great voluntary citizen army of Yeomanry, of Militia, and of Volunteers. ( Cheers. ) These would have to be our stand-by in the hour of need, as they have been in the South African war,