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So Little Masonry

In its final version it is one of the imperishable rhetorical classics, made all the more memorable for its echo of Shakespeare’s line from Henry V: ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’. But it has a less distinguished history. In a by-election campaign in Oldham in 1899 the 24-year-old Liberal candidate, who was fighting the first political campaign of his career, had said, in all gravity: ‘Never before were there so many people in England, and never before have they had so much to eat.’ Nine years later the colonial under-secretary gave a speech on a projected irrigation scheme in Africa in which he said: ‘Nowhere else in the world could so enormous a mass of water be held up by so little masonry.’

The name of the writer and speaker of these words in Oldham and in Africa was Winston Churchill, and neither of these were his finest hour. But then, suddenly, in August 1940, in a panegyric to the Battle of Britain fighter pilots who truly had stood between the nation and the barbarians, Churchill declared: ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed, by so many, to so few.’ In its ultimate, eternal permutation it has a classic simplicity and an effortless flow that seem inevitable. Even at this distance in time it is still moving to say it out loud. For Churchill, the moment finally ascended to the height of the words and the effect is mesmeric.

Rhetoric cannot work when the phrases are too lavish for their topic. But there is no more important subject for the democratic politician than the coming or the conduct of war. The preservation of order is the first responsibility of the state, and so to launch a nation into war is the gravest thing a leader will ever do. There is no greater burden of office and, correspondingly, in the elevated words of Pericles, David Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan we hear some of the finest rhetoric in the canon. When the threat is as grave as war, the words must measure up to the task.

This is where the tradition of rhetoric began – with a eulogy to the lost sons of Athens. In the Funeral Oration, Pericles tried to console the bereaved with the argument that voluntary sacrifice in battle is the highest form of civic duty. We have seen that Lincoln used the same argument at Gettysburg in 1863 in his eulogy to those slain in the American Civil War: ‘from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion’.

We will see too that in a democracy war needs a purpose beyond the cessation of hostility. The speeches in this chapter are also about the purpose to which peace must be turned. Pericles offers a eulogy to democracy as much as to the departed. Lloyd George defines the land fit for heroes. Wilson imagines a global alliance of democratic nations. Churchill offers blood, sweat, toil and tears to see off the tyrant and Reagan stands to speak on the right side of the Berlin Wall which marks off the free world. In all instances, the war is being fought for a noble purpose, not merely to keep the enemy at bay, but to deepen the commitment to a free nation.

The original casus belli – that the nation was in peril – is never enough. The war has to be fought for better politics. The social legislation of the Labour Attlee government between 1945 and 1951 acquired its moral force from the aftermath of war. The conflict itself and its immediately succeeding years should be seen as a single event. The rhetorical work for what comes later begins during the war itself. War has always been, strangely enough, one of the ways in which democracies wield the resources to progress. Rhetoric that defends the idea of the people is the way that democracies heal their internal rifts. Rhetoric that commends the idea of the people against predators is the democratic response to threat. At a moment of peril the speech, the means by which the leader inspires the nation to withstand assault and live to fight another day, is vital. There is no other time when so much rests on so few words.

PERICLES

Funeral Oration

Athens

Winter, c.431 BC

Pericles (494–429 BC) stands at the front, if not necessarily at the top, of the history of rhetoric. Thucydides, who bequeaths us our knowledge of Pericles, rated him the finest speaker of his time, one of the few men in whose hands democracy, an otherwise dangerous creed, was safe. The Funeral Oration is the source of Pericles’ reputation as, in a phrase from Thucydides, ‘the first man among the Athenians’.

A general, an orator and a patron of the arts, Pericles was the guiding spirit of Athens from c.460 to 429 BC, the period in which the city was rebuilt after the destruction of war with Persia. The Parthenon was built on the Acropolis and Athens was established as the artistic and cultural centre of the Hellenic world. Pericles was a reformer. His introduction of payment for public service permitted many more members of the Athenian demos to take part in public affairs. But the judgement of Thucydides describes the paradox of Pericles as a democrat. Pericles is not the kind of democrat who would be so defined according to a modern sensibility. His very pre-eminence has a monarchical aspect in tension with the spirit of democratic politics. So does his support for Athenian imperialism and his proposal that citizenship should be limited only to those who could show that both parents had been citizens. We also need to be careful not to make a fetish of the word democracy. Citizenship in ancient Greece was denied to women and slaves, and not all free men had a vote in the assembly. When Pericles invokes the idea of the people he does not mean to include them all, or even half of them.

It is to Thucydides that we owe the text of the Funeral Oration. It is all but certain that this extract from the History of the Peloponnesian War differs from the words Pericles actually spoke. Quite how much the two diverge we cannot know, despite healthy scholarly disputes about the issue. It is likely that Thucydides was a witness to the speech, but he casts doubt on his own fidelity to the original when he writes: ‘I have found it difficult to remember the precise words used in the speeches which I listened to myself … so my method has been, while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation.’ What we have is Thucydides remembering, no doubt improvising, perhaps improving, Pericles.

We can be more certain that the oration was given at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War (c.431 BC) to honour the fallen, as part of the annual public funeral for the state’s war dead. Rather like Donald Trump today, Thucydides makes much of the size of the audience, perhaps to stress the vital importance of the occasion. It is also recorded that Pericles delivered the speech on a rostrum built high, so that his declamation could carry. It was to be his final testament as an orator: not long after the Funeral Oration a plague swept the city and took Pericles with it. His words, though, have lived on, and as we have seen, their echoes ring in the speeches of American presidents in a new republic more than two millennia later.

Most of those who have spoken here before me have commended the lawgiver who added this oration to our other funeral customs. It seemed to them a worthy thing that such an honour should be given at their burial to the dead who have fallen on the field of battle. But I should have preferred that, when men’s deeds have been brave, they should be honoured in deed only, and with such an honour as this public funeral, which you are now witnessing. Then the reputation of many would not have been imperilled on the eloquence or want of eloquence of one, and their virtues believed or not as he spoke well or ill. For it is difficult to say neither too little nor too much; and even moderation is apt not to give the impression of truthfulness. The friend of the dead who knows the facts is likely to think that the words of the speaker fall short of his knowledge and of his wishes; another who is not so well informed, when he hears of anything that surpasses his own powers, will be envious and will suspect exaggeration. Mankind are tolerant of the praises of others so long as each hearer thinks that he can do as well or nearly as well himself, but, when the speaker rises above him, jealousy is aroused and he begins to be incredulous. However, since our ancestors have set the seal of their approval upon the practice, I must obey, and to the utmost of my power shall endeavour to satisfy the wishes and beliefs of all who hear me.

Pericles begins with a lament about the need for rhetoric. It would be preferable, he says, convincing nobody, if the dead could be honoured without the requirement for high-sounding testimony. It would, of course, be better if the dead could speak for themselves. In their absence Pericles, will do his best to rise to the occasion which is imperilled, he says, by the reliance on a single orator.

The funeral oration had become a familiar ritual in Greece by the late fifth century. The remains of the dead were left out for three days in a tent where offerings could be made. A funeral procession followed, with ten cypress coffins carrying the remains, one for each of the nine Athenian tribes and one for the remains of the unidentified. Any citizen was free to join the procession. A public sepulchre in the city’s most beautiful suburb was reserved for those who fell in war. At the graveside, an orator, described by Thucydides as ‘of approved wisdom and eminent reputation’, delivered the eulogy.

The ritual created a civic unity which it was the task of the orator to express. A speech is always a ritual that enacts a moment, even before a word is spoken. In an era in which reports from the battlefield were distant and unreliable, the funeral oration created a single experience of the war for the assembled citizens. It became the sanctioned memory of the war. Pericles is writing history up on the rostrum even before Thucydides adds his second draft.

He does so with a form that has grown familiar. This is a variation on the theme of ‘Words cannot express …’ But words have to express. That’s all the orator is there for. Thus, Pericles is to be taken seriously but not literally. Like Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, he is feigning an inability to find words that have the weight to capture the moment. It’s a conceit, of course. If Pericles really thought he couldn’t meet the moment he wouldn’t – he shouldn’t – have taken the gig. But he did; he couldn’t resist.

I will speak first of our ancestors, for it is right and seemly that now, when we are lamenting the dead, a tribute should be paid to their memory. There has never been a time when they did not inhabit this land, which by their valour they will have handed down from generation to generation, and we have received from them a free state. But if they were worthy of praise, still more were our fathers, who added to their inheritance, and after many a struggle transmitted to us their sons this great empire. And we ourselves assembled here today, who are still most of us in the vigour of life, have carried the work of improvement further, and have richly endowed our city with all things, so that she is sufficient for herself both in peace and war. Of the military exploits by which our various possessions were acquired, or of the energy with which we or our fathers drove back the tide of war, Hellenic or barbarian, I will not speak; for the tale would be long and is familiar to you. But before I praise the dead, I should like to point out by what principles of action we rose to power, and under what institutions and through what manner of life our empire became great. For I conceive that such thoughts are not unsuited to the occasion, and that this numerous assembly of citizens and strangers may profitably listen to them.

Having merely gestured towards the habitual routine of a funeral oration, Pericles then affronts convention. He does pay perfunctory tribute to the ancestral heritage of contemporary Athenians and to the acquisition of empire, but then he changes course. Military valour, the usual subject of such an occasion, he dismisses as a theme too familiar to dwell upon. There is more than a little political calculation in this manoeuvre. The war is not going well. The early results are disappointing, and Pericles is using the speech to see off his enemies.

The privilege of speaking uninterrupted at the commemoration of the war dead is an opportunity too good for a politician of his stature to miss. Pericles had promised that the war would bring glory, and glory so far had been conspicuously absent. This explains why he dares instead to shift the focus to the form of government that the city enjoys.

This is a signal moment. Rhetoric and democracy fuse in this argument. The fact that Pericles needs an argument at all is a much more critical point than it might on first hearing sound. The priest, the king, the tyrant, simply act. In a democracy, the judgement of words replaces the asserted wisdom of the tyrannical fiat. Democracy anoints the argument rather than the individual. For this reason, the public speech is essential to democracy. It is also the principal innovation of the new form of politics. Pericles insists that he is going to talk about Athens itself, reinterpreting the deaths of the citizens for the glory of its name. He is going to establish the polis as so splendid that death in war is a glorious, almost a desirable, contribution to the national story.

Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. Our government does not copy our neighbours’, but is an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while there exists equal justice to all and alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognised; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty an obstacle, but a man may benefit his country whatever the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbour if he does what he likes; we do not put on sour looks at him which, though harmless, are not pleasant. While we are thus unconstrained in our private business, a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by respect for the authorities and for the laws, having a particular regard to those which are ordained for the protection of the injured as well as those unwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor of them the reprobation of the general sentiment.

This speech contains democratic multitudes. Here is the first usage of the cliché that some might have thought a New Labour coinage: the many not the few. Here is ‘equal justice to all’, which later becomes the subject of a speech by Thomas Jefferson. Here is equality before the law, modern meritocracy, the private liberty of the citizen, respect for the public interest, protection of the vulnerable, the dignity of the institutions of state, and here is the court of public opinion. In this passage Pericles is inventing the democratic idiom, fashioning the phrases that come to define government by the people.

This is the first great address in praise of the idea of the citizen body. It is for this collection of democratic virtues, says Pericles in an audacious move, that the dead lived and died. The tombs of the dead metaphorically fade from view as the speech shifts from the particular to the general, from people to an idea.

Only an advocate of the idea of democracy would license such a switch, which explains why the Funeral Oration fell for many an age out of favour until its ideas came back into vogue. Democracy disappeared with the demise of the classical world until it was revived in the nineteenth century. Pericles thus reads better today than he did during most of later history. We bring to his words our anachronistic desire to defend our own practice, and find it described with startling contemporary exactitude in this passage. The survival of the Funeral Oration, and the loss of most of Athenian rhetoric, is not really, as Thucydides tries to persuade us, owed to the intrinsically finer quality of what Pericles says, or the way he says it. Its longevity, and its appeal today, is owed more to the fact that Pericles sounds rather like Thomas Jefferson, who in turn sounds somewhat like us. This section therefore heralds the moment when a tradition is founded.

To sum up: I say that Athens is the school of Hellas, and that the individual Athenian in his own person seems to have the power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and grace. This is no passing and idle word, but truth and fact; and the assertion is verified by the position to which these qualities have raised the state. For in the hour of trial Athens alone among her contemporaries is superior to the report of her. No enemy who comes against her is indignant at the reverses which he sustains at the hands of such a city; no subject complains that his masters are unworthy of him. And we shall assuredly not be without witnesses; there are mighty monuments of our power which will make us the wonder of this and of succeeding ages; we shall not need the praises of Homer or of any other panegyrist whose poetry may please for the moment, although his representation of the facts will not bear the light of day. For we have compelled every land and every sea to open a path for our valour, and have everywhere planted eternal memorials of our friendship and of our enmity. Such is the city for whose sake these men nobly fought and died; they could not bear the thought that she might be taken from them; and every one of us who survive should gladly toil on her behalf. I have dwelt upon the greatness of Athens because I want to show you that we are contending for a higher prize than those who enjoy none of these privileges, and to establish by manifest proof the merit of these men whom I am now commemorating. Their loftiest praise has been already spoken. For in magnifying the city I have magnified them, and men like them whose virtues made her glorious.

Pericles now declares that the democratic spirit that carries his praise also extends glory to the city in its foreign pursuits. There is, again, a highly contemporary resonance to this passage. In recent years it has been common to argue that the provinces of domestic and foreign policy have merged. Here Pericles does exactly that, claiming that the virtues at home in Athens equip the city for its greater good abroad. Under the pressure of war, he suggests, the ethics that Athens follows at home will sustain the glory of the city.

Pericles makes a major claim here about the superiority of democracy over rival forms of constitution. In one of the best-crafted phrases in the speech he says that only Athens is superior to the report of her. This intriguing phrase has the implication that democracies will, probably from envy, suffer unfair criticism from outside, from states that cannot believe that the advertised virtues of a democracy are real. He is also implying that democracy, by its very nature, will always be subject to critique from within, and there will be spells when the populace loses faith and is tempted by simpler solutions.

Pericles goes on to elucidate that democratic superiority will be measured by the kindness that a democratic state shows, both to its enemies and to its own subjects. Democracies hold themselves to higher standards of ethical behaviour than autocracies, and so they should. This point is later central to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America – that some of the virtues of democracy are hidden in plain sight yet they prove their worth in the end. Pericles then dismisses the accounts of Homer as if he were swatting away disobliging reports in a hostile press. The test of democracy is time. Its superiority will become clear in the verdict of the historians. Though there is no reason to suppose that Thucydides is speaking for himself here, it is important to bear in mind that this is his account of Pericles. It would be no great surprise if this were the moment the historian chose to turn up the volume.

The sacrifice which they collectively made was individually repaid to them; for they received again each one for himself a praise which grows not old, and the noblest of all tombs, I speak not of that in which their remains are laid, but of that in which their glory survives, and is proclaimed always and on every fitting occasion both in word and deed. For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples, and, esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war … Wherefore I do not now pity the parents of the dead who stand here; I would rather comfort them. You know that your dead have passed away amid manifold vicissitudes; and that they may be deemed fortunate who have gained their utmost honour, whether an honourable death like theirs, or an honourable sorrow like yours, and whose share of happiness has been so ordered that the term of their happiness is likewise the term of their life. I know how hard it is to make you feel this, when the good fortune of others will too often remind you of the gladness which once lightened your hearts. And sorrow is felt at the want of those blessings, not which a man never knew, but which were a part of his life before they were taken from him. Some of you are of an age at which they may hope to have other children, and they ought to bear their sorrow better; not only will the children who may hereafter be born make them forget their own lost ones, but the city will be doubly a gainer. She will not be left desolate, and she will be safer. For a man’s counsel cannot have equal weight or worth, when he alone has no children to risk in the general danger. To those of you who have passed their prime, I say: ‘Congratulate yourselves that you have been happy during the greater part of your days; remember that your life of sorrow will not last long, and be comforted by the glory of those who are gone. For the love of honour alone is ever young, and not riches, as some say, but honour is the delight of men when they are old and useless.

‘The whole earth is the tomb of famous men.’ Their memorial will be graven on the hearts of men rather than on stone. Pericles lays it on thick for the war dead, deploying the full scale of rhetorical flattery to disguise the fact that this is a truly brutal passage which, stripped of its eloquent veneer, more or less says: ‘Try not to worry about your dead sons because you will be dead yourself soon.’ This is the one moment in the speech when the greater glory of the city sounds a rather callous objective.

But Pericles is trying to inspire his listeners to summon their courage. That is why he goes as far as to say that there can be no greater demonstration of moral virtue, of arete, than willing death in battle. There is more than a hint of rhetorical duplicity here. Is it actually true, in fact, that the dead lost their lives for the glory of Athens? Does Pericles have privileged access to the thoughts of the valiant men as they went to their deaths? No, this is rhetorical projection. He is conjuring glory from demise, glory for the greater good of the city.

Speaking at a moment of crisis, Pericles is trying to head off the criticism that democracy stifles individual excellence. The usual way to do this would be to list the achievements of the war to date. It would be the first instance of a speech that will become a political staple – the ‘a lot done, a lot still to do’ speech. But Pericles has no achievements to offer to his audience. He therefore has to return to the higher principle for which valour has been spent, namely the love of honour. Athens was a society that held to a code of honour, and so Pericles is saying that the men of Athens who died have nevertheless graduated with honours. The supreme standard of honour was martial valour, so those whose lives had been given in the service of the city deserved the renown that Pericles is here bestowing.

This is an awkward passage in which the gap between the requirement of a funeral oration and the political desire to heap laurels on the city opens to its widest. It is evident too how sensibilities have changed. Few would now venture to argue that not having children made someone care less about the future of the state. Indeed, when, in 2016, Andrea Leadsom implied just that of her rival for the Conservative Party leadership, Theresa May, Ms Leadsom was forced to resign from the process. It probably would not have rescued her, but she might have presented Pericles as a witness in her defence.

I have paid the required tribute, in obedience to the law, making use of such fitting words as I had. The tribute of deeds has been paid in part; for the dead have them in deeds, and it remains only that their children should be maintained at the public charge until they are grown up: this is the solid prize with which, as with a garland, Athens crowns her sons living and dead, after a struggle like theirs. For where the rewards of virtue are greatest, there the noblest citizens are enlisted in the service of the state. And now, when you have duly lamented, everyone his own dead, you may depart.

Although it lay in cold storage for a long time during the wilderness years between the end of the classical era and nineteenth-century Europe, the Funeral Oration has been, since then, regarded as a classic, and Pericles has turned up in many guises. He was quoted in advertisements designed to boost morale during the First World War, and after the conflict his words appeared on war memorials. At Gettysburg, Lincoln begins, as Pericles does, with a reference to the city fathers. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Congressman Major Robert Owens declared: ‘Defiant orations of Pericles must now rise out of the ashes.’

The state that Pericles describes has little in common with the faction-ridden, highly political atmosphere of Athens, but this is a eulogy and a little exaggeration is in order. That is not to say, however, that this is really a conventional funeral oration, because Pericles is doing the opposite of posting an obituary. He is defining an ideal state for the future. He has come not so much to bury the dead as to praise a living democracy. You can hear that in the opening to this passage: ‘I have paid the required tribute’. He could hardly be more perfunctory. His enthusiasm only fires when he gets to the reason for the sacrifice. Real people died in the war, says Pericles, for the idea of the people in the abstract.

This is a gloriously expressed cold comfort, which is echoed, in its purpose, centuries later by David Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill, all of whom make speeches seeking simultaneously to raise the morale of their audience and define the war for the higher cause of democracy. The Funeral Oration is an unusual, unexpected speech which is more a paean to politics than it is a panegyric to the war dead. The words of Pericles echo to us down the ages as we struggle to recall that this gift, the idea of democracy, is so precious an inheritance.

DAVID LLOYD GEORGE

The Great Pinnacle of Sacrifice

Queen’s Hall, London

19 September 1914

The most famous Welshman to be born in Manchester, David Lloyd George (1863–1945) was the unrivalled rhetorical genius of the first years of twentieth-century British politics. His admirers, who were many, called him the Welsh Wizard, and he was known as the Goat to those, just as many, who did not trust him. In his years in office Lloyd George was known as the Big Beast, and from the beginning he was the self-styled Man from the Outside, a solicitor from Porthmadog in Wales with no university education. This attitude explains the sharp edges to his rhetoric and the alliances he struck up with others whom he viewed as coming from without the established fold.

Lloyd George was a contradictory man. He was, as A. J. P. Taylor has written, the champion of the poor who fell in with the rich; the scourge of Ireland who offered it the Free State. Some part of the suspicion Lloyd George incurred was due to his oratorical gifts. The famous address in Limehouse, east London, in defence of his tax-raising budget of 1909 was seen by opponents as an effort to stir up class warfare. ‘Limehousing’ became a byword for rabble-rousing and demagoguery.

David Lloyd George was brought up in a dissenting, Welsh-speaking household in North Wales. For the first decade of his political career as a Liberal MP, he confined himself to Welsh issues, but he later gained a reputation as a radical opponent of the Boer War. His first Cabinet post was as president of the Board of Trade, in 1905. After the Liberal landslide of 1906 – the victory, as George Dangerfield famously said, from which the Liberals never recovered – Lloyd George served as chancellor of the exchequer. During these years he introduced reforms which, in retrospect, began the process of creating a national welfare state from the scattered voluntary provision of the time. With the start of war, he became, successively, Herbert Asquith’s minister of munitions and minister of war, before the 1916 coup in which he took the top job himself. He remained prime minister until October 1922, when he and the rest of the coalition ministry were toppled by a backbench Conservative revolt, commemorated to this day in the collective name the Tory backbenchers give to themselves: the 1922 Committee.

In the speech that follows we see Lloyd George as chancellor of the exchequer charged with making the case that, on the brink of war, national honour demands that the country stand and fight. He did it so well that he talked himself into the role he had always coveted, as prime minister. His response was in striking contrast with Asquith’s, who seemed too weak a leader to carry a nation through war. Asquith was never able to articulate the case for conscription with the poetic splendour that Lloyd George mustered in 1915 and 1916, and he never began to match the passion exhibited here.

I have come here this afternoon to talk to my fellow countrymen about this Great War and the part we ought to take in it. I feel my task is easier after we have been listening to the greatest battle-song in the world. There is no man in this room who has always regarded the prospects of engaging in a great war with greater reluctance, with greater repugnance, than I have done throughout the whole of my political life. There is no man, either inside or outside of this room, more convinced that we could not have avoided it without national dishonour. I am fully alive to the fact that whenever a nation has been engaged in any war she has always invoked the sacred name of honour. Many a crime has been committed in its name; there are some crimes being committed now. But, all the same, national honour is a reality, and any nation that disregards it is doomed.

Even after the stirring sound of ‘Men of Harlech’, which the audience had sung before he spoke, Lloyd George begins with a note that comes close to apology. Of all the people to make the case for war, he is in one sense the least likely. His early reputation as a politician had been forged in his opposition to the Boer War. He had only joined the war Cabinet after a great deal of anguished deliberation. When he did relent, he steered a middle way at first between those who had favoured intervention even before the demise of Belgium and those who opposed any intervention at all. He took a long time to acknowledge the threat of German aggression.

Not that you get any sense of doubt from this speech. Lloyd George commits himself to his case with characteristic gusto, using his previous scepticism to cast himself as the radical who came in from the cold. The case really needed the advocacy that Lloyd George offers. The standard picture of August 1914, with men rushing to join up, has been amended by more recent historical scholarship. Many men entertained the same doubts as Lloyd George. Here the zealous convert launches the task of persuading the reluctant that the cause is just.

Why is our honour as a country involved in this war? Because, in the first place, we are bound in an honourable obligation to defend the independence, the liberty, the integrity of a small neighbour that has lived peaceably, but she could not have compelled us, because she was weak. The man who declines to discharge his debt because his creditor is too poor to enforce it is a blackguard. We entered into this treaty, a solemn treaty, a full treaty, to defend Belgium and her integrity. Our signatures are attached to the document. Our signatures do not stand alone there. This was not the only country to defend the integrity of Belgium. Russia, France, Austria, and Prussia – they are all there. Why did they not perform the obligation? It is suggested that if we quote this treaty it is purely an excuse on our part. It is our low craft and cunning, just to cloak our jealousy of a superior civilisation we are attempting to destroy.

This is a very Welsh speech. Lloyd George took his rhetorical lessons from his uncle, a Welsh preacher, who had brought him up. Throughout his long career as a speaker, Lloyd George retained an evangelical, nonconformist air. The audience was made up of three thousand of the Welsh community in London, and Lloyd George was, at the time, in the thick of a battle to persuade Kitchener, the war secretary, to allow the creation of a specifically Welsh army corps. Repeated references to Wales assert the speaker’s credentials by associating him with the nation, and the speech is thus constructed around the appeal to the honour of a small country, of which Wales is a resonant example.

This allows Lloyd George to hit his main motif, which is that the pike is about to consume the minnow. Wales, in effect, merges in the speech with Belgium, Serbia and the fraternity of small nations. Lloyd George’s description of Belgium as ‘peaceable, industrious, thrifty, hard-working, giving offence to no one’ is a description of the virtues the Welsh audience would itself have claimed. Defence of the little nations was a regular refrain in Lloyd George’s liberalism. The small nations must stand as one against this use of power. Britain gave an undertaking to Belgium to defend its honour, and that is the same, in effect, as our own honour, the honour of our own beloved small nation, Wales.

That Treaty Bond was this: we called upon the belligerent Powers to respect that treaty. We called upon France; we called upon Germany … It is now the interest of Prussia to break the treaty, and she has done it. Well, why? She avowed it with cynical contempt for every principle of justice. She says treaties only bind you when it is to your interest to keep them. ‘What is a treaty?’ says the German Chancellor. ‘A scrap of paper.’ Have you any five-pound notes about you? I am not calling for them. Have you any of those neat little Treasury pound notes? If you have, burn them; they are only ‘scraps of paper’. What are they made of? Rags. What are they worth? The whole credit of the British Empire. ‘Scraps of paper’ … Treaties are the currency of international statesmanship … This doctrine of the scrap of paper … that treaties only bind a nation as long as it is to its interest, goes to the root of public law. It is the straight road to barbarism and the whole machinery of civilisation will break down if this doctrine wins in this war. We are fighting against barbarism. But there is only one way of putting it right. If there are nations that say they will only respect treaties when it is to their interest to do so, we must make it to their interest to do so for the future.

Two characteristics of Lloyd George mingle here in a brilliantly minted passage. It is funny and it is devastatingly direct. The two attributes create a sort of profundity. Lloyd George was influenced by the music hall and was by no means averse to its tricks. There was laughter in the Queen’s Hall when Lloyd George asked the audience if anyone had any money on them. A joke in a speech needs to pass two tests. It must, of course, be funny but there is another requirement. The joke should be relevant and, like screenwriters concealing a plot point with a gag, should contribute to the argument of the text. Here the joke passes both tests. The laughter is genuine at the thought that the chancellor might like to borrow a fiver, but the passage also propounds an important metaphor.

Lloyd George came into this speech highly praised for his recent action in stabilising the monetary system. The currency, an international treaty; what are they but scraps of paper? The treaty is, says Lloyd George, a promissory note of a nation’s honour. France and Prussia had both pledged to protect the integrity of Belgium. The Prussians were now breaking the bond. See how much weight Lloyd George places on the memorable phrase ‘this doctrine of the scrap of paper’.

He makes a profound point about the nature of the rule of law, which is that it can only function if its subjects comply. Enforcement of the law is costly and difficult and demands sacrifice. Germany is violating this defining norm of compliance, and that justifies Lloyd George’s stringent verdict: this is barbarism and it has to be countered. Look how far he has travelled in this section. From a joke about money, to the tokens of commerce, to the sacred obligation of honouring a treaty, the breach of which is barbarism which has to be turned back, even if the cost is war. By the conclusion, no one is left laughing.

Belgium has been treated brutally, how brutally we shall not yet know. We know already too much. What has she done? Did she send an ultimatum to Germany? Did she challenge Germany? Was she preparing to make war on Germany? Had she ever inflicted any wrongs upon Germany which the Kaiser was bound to redress? She was one of the most unoffending little countries in Europe. She was peaceable, industrious, thrifty, hard-working, giving offence to no one … What is their crime? Their crime was that they trusted to the word of a Prussian King. I don’t know what the Kaiser hopes to achieve by this war. I have a shrewd idea of what he will get, but one thing is made certain, that no nation in future will ever commit that crime again. I am not going to enter into these tales. Many of them are untrue; war is a grim, ghastly business at best, and I am not going to say that all that has been said in the way of tales of outrage is true. I will go beyond that, and say that if you turn two millions of men forced, conscripted, and compelled and driven into the field, you will certainly get among them a certain number of men who will do things that the nation itself will be ashamed of. I am not depending on them. It is enough for me to have the story which the Germans themselves avow, admit, defend, proclaim. The burning and massacring, the shooting down of harmless people – why? Because, according to the Germans, they fired on German soldiers. What business had German soldiers there at all? Belgium was acting in pursuance of a most sacred right, the right to defend your own home.

In a war speech, home is not the only front. Lloyd George is determined to convey resolution to his adversary. There is no concession, no implicit negotiation here. Lloyd George’s task of persuasion is the one that will confront Churchill, his friend and rival in rhetorical fireworks, twenty-six years later. For the moment, Lloyd George is the master. Contemporary accounts record the spell in which he held his audience bound. His voice was rich and resonant where Churchill’s was reedy. The notion that Churchill had a stutter is a myth, but he certainly had a lisp, which meant that he struggled with sibilant sounds. Churchill, though, had one big advantage: his wartime speeches enjoy world renown, while Lloyd George’s are largely lost to posterity. No one can outdo Churchill as a war speaker. Lloyd George at his best stands second-best, but we have no recordings of what he said. As Kenneth Morgan has put it: ‘Churchill spoke to history; Lloyd George spoke only to his listeners.’ The speech was covered in newspapers and distributed as a pamphlet. Far more people would have read than heard it, but the fact remains that Churchill had the wireless and Lloyd George didn’t.

There is one more parallel between the two, which concerns the question of truth. Lloyd George judiciously refuses to swallow every story about the depravity of German soldiers. By acknowledging the likelihood of propaganda, he positions himself on higher moral ground. Yet the perilous circumstances of wartime mean there is something in the accusation that rhetoric skirts close to untruth. As Churchill will do in the House of Commons in 1940, Lloyd George is not giving a merely factual account of the status of the war effort. That would be too pessimistic for his purpose, which is to inspire confidence in ultimate victory. It is not untrue; but nor is it altogether true.

Russia has a special regard for Serbia. She has a special interest in Serbia. Russians have shed their blood for Serbian independence many a time. Serbia is a member of her family, and she cannot see Serbia maltreated. Austria knew that. Germany knew that, and Germany turned round to Russia and said: ‘Here, I insist that you shall stand by with your arms folded whilst Austria is strangling to death your little brother. So lay your hands on that little fellow, and I will tear your ramshackle Empire limb from limb.’ And he is doing it! That is the story of the little nations. The world owes much to little nations – and to little men. This theory of bigness – you must have a big empire and a big nation, and a big man – well, long legs have their advantage in a retreat. Frederick the Great chose his warriors for their height, and that tradition has become a policy in Germany. Germany applies that ideal to nations; she will only allow six-feet-two nations to stand in the ranks. But all the world owes much to the little five feet high nations. The greatest art of the world was the work of little nations. The most enduring literature of the world came from little nations. The greatest literature of England came from her when she was a nation of the size of Belgium fighting a great Empire. The heroic deeds that thrill humanity through generations were the deeds of little nations fighting for their freedom!

Transcripts record the huge number of occasions on which this speech was interrupted by hisses, laughter, cheers, applause and shouts of hear, hear. Audiences then were more demonstrative than they would be now, and Lloyd George turns parts of the address into call and response. Standing alone to speak can be a lonely event; it is comforting to hear periodic appreciation. Applause also creates an atmosphere. The end of this section is a classic ‘clap line’, signalled even in Lloyd George’s script with an exclamation mark. Poor speakers try to rouse the audience with only a rising intonation and an increased volume at the end of a line, but the applause will only ever be resounding when the vocal trickery is deployed for an important, completed thought.

Lloyd George’s mastery of technique is displayed by the way he conjures grave days in demotic vocabulary and strikingly familiar imagery. A vast body of research attests to the capacity of humans to recall mind-pictures much quicker than abstract arguments. A congruent image allows us to recall the argument for which it stands. Russia as a brother standing, with his arms folded, while his brother was attacked, will allow the audience to recall why passive quiescence is not possible. The diminutive Lloyd George – himself notoriously less than five feet tall – then goes into a comic riff that verges on the absurd, describing big countries as the ‘six foot two’ nations and the smaller nations as ‘the five feet high’ nations. It leads him to a paean to the great literary achievements of Britain and a convenient omission of the fact that, though Britain may have been a small nation in the days of Shakespeare, she did go on, within living memory of most people in the audience, to became the world’s biggest empire.

Have you read the Kaiser’s speeches? If you have not a copy, I advise you to buy it; they will soon be out of print, and you won’t have any more of the same sort again. They are full of the clatter and bluster of German militarists – the mailed fist, the shining armour. Poor old mailed fist – its knuckles are getting a little bruised. Poor shining armour – the shine is being knocked out of it. But there is the same swagger and boastfulness running through the whole of the speeches … I do not believe he meant all these speeches. It was simply the martial straddle which he had acquired; but there were men around him who meant every word of it … You know the type of motorist, the terror of the roads, with a 60-h.p. car. He thinks the roads are made for him, and anybody who impedes the action of his car by a single mile is knocked down. The Prussian junker is the road-hog of Europe. Small nationalities in his way hurled to the roadside, bleeding and broken; women and children crushed under the wheels of his cruel car. Britain ordered out of his road. All I can say is this: if the old British spirit is alive in British hearts, that bully will be torn from his seat. Were he to win it would be the greatest catastrophe that has befallen democracy since the days of the Holy Alliance and its ascendancy. They think we cannot beat them. It will not be easy. It will be a long job. It will be a terrible war. But in the end we shall march through terror to triumph.

It is a mark of how seriously Lloyd George is taking the enemy that he opts for mockery. The clatter and the bluster, the mailed fist with bruised knuckles. He can get away with this because the speech is tightly argued, rich with historical examples. However, this is an example of how even a skilled writer can get carried away. Suggesting that the Prussians are the road-hog of Europe sounds quaint to us now. In fact, this reference was the height of modernity at the time. The motor car was a recent introduction to the streets of European cities. Mr Toad had been born in 1908, in The Wind in the Willows. Five years before Lloyd George gave his speech a poster had greeted travellers into London with a lament for the loss of employment and a claim that the newfangled motors would kill ‘your children, dogs and chickens’ and ‘spoil your clothes with dust’. It was posted by the horse-and-cart lobby trying to stop the march of change. Lloyd George is therefore conjuring a fear of modernity, the idea that the Prussians are perverting the advance of science, using knowledge to illicit ends. It is, in other words, rather like Wagner’s music: less bad than it sounds.

However, with that defence entered, it’s all too stretched. By the time Lloyd George imagines turfing the Prussian bully out of the seat of the car, we feel that it is running away from him, to adopt his own metaphor. It also fails to set the mood for what follows, which is the necessary chorus of any war speech – the regular reminder that we, the forces of good, will prevail. A driver being taken off the road does not prepare us for the greatest catastrophe faced by democracy since the days of the Holy Alliance.

Those who have fallen have consecrated deaths. They have taken their part in the making of a new Europe, a new world. I can see signs of its coming in the glare of the battlefield. The people will gain more by this struggle in all lands than they comprehend at the present moment. It is true they will be rid of the menace to their freedom. But that is not all. There is something infinitely greater and more enduring which is emerging already out of this great conflict; a new patriotism, richer, nobler, more exalted than the old. I see a new recognition amongst all classes, high and low, shedding themselves of selfishness; a new recognition that the honour of a country does not depend merely on the maintenance of its glory in the stricken field, but in protecting its homes from distress as well. It is a new patriotism, it is bringing a new outlook for all classes. A great flood of luxury and of sloth which had submerged the land is receding, and a new Britain is appearing. We can see for the first time the fundamental things that matter in life and that have been obscured from our vision by the tropical growth of prosperity.

The speaker at a time of war has two tasks: first to justify the war in the present; second to define the future it will be fought for. This is what Lloyd George does here. Because he is moving to his climax his terms are broad and imprecise. He could have drawn on his own record as a reforming chancellor of the exchequer: the nationalisation of the British welfare state began in 1911 with the work of Lloyd George in legislating for a state pension provision. He could have chosen to specify the land fit for heroes, as it was to become known, by drawing on his own reputation as a social reformer. It would risked bathos, though, to descend from the heights of war against a dangerous madman into the details of welfare benefits. Lloyd George instead trades on the assumed knowledge that his audience will know what he means. We see here the advantage of speaking to an audience whose level of political acquaintance is high.

The passage is like the historic war speech in miniature. The trajectory of war rhetoric, from Pericles onwards, is all there. War costs lives, and the only way to honour the war dead, to make a just cause from their sacrifice, is to remake the world. Military victory is never alone enough. Democracies turn war into a war for the improvement of democracy, and not just its survival.

May I tell you, in a simple parable, what I think this war is doing for us? I know a valley in North Wales, between the mountains and the sea – a beautiful valley, snug, comfortable, sheltered by the mountains from all the bitter blasts. It was very enervating, and I remember how the boys were in the habit of climbing the hills above the village to have a glimpse of the great mountains in the distance, and to be stimulated and freshened by the breezes which, came from the hilltops, and by the great spectacle of that great valley. We have been living in a sheltered valley for generations. We have been too comfortable, too indulgent, many, perhaps, too selfish. And the stern hand of fate has scourged us to an elevation where we can see the great everlasting things that matter for a nation; the great peaks of honour we had forgotten – duty and patriotism clad in glittering white: the great pinnacle of sacrifice pointing like a rugged finger to Heaven. We shall descend into the valleys again, but as long as the men and women of this generation last they will carry in their hearts the image of these great mountain peaks, whose foundations are unshaken though Europe rock and sway in the convulsions of a great war.