Excerpt from War-Time Speeches: A Compilation of Public Utterances in Great Britain; In Connection With the Session of the Imperial War Cabinet and Imperial War Conference, 1917
I have been strongly urged to publish in pamphlet form some of the speeches which I have recently made in this country. To this I have finally agreed, in spite of their ephemeral character and their rough unpolished form. The fact is that these speeches were made from very brief notes and that for their reproduction I am now dependent on the actual form in which they were delivered as reported in the Press, often in a very condensed form; indeed, some of my addresses were summarised to such an extent that their reconstruction from the reports has been found impossible.
In spite of their form, however, a general unity of ideas runs through them all, which I hope has proved helpful and may in pamphlet form interest a wider circle. The speeches all deal either with our war aims or the British Empire or the future government of the world. These three subjects are, in my mind, closely related and rest on the same basis of ideas. Whatever the causes and origins of the war, the continuous increasing pressure of this vast calamity on the human spirit has pushed to the front the basic ideas on which our Western civilisation rests, and is silently bringing about a far-reaching change in our political and social outlook.
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