When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches that shape the world – and why we need them. Philip Collins

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.