"I speak perhaps, with a warmth of indignation unbefitting a Foreign Secretary, but with the news of this outrage...I confess that I find it difficult to measure my epithets, for...this Irish packet boat, crammed as it always is with men, women, and children, in broad daylight was deliberately torpedoed by a German submarine. It was carrying no military stores. It was serving no military ends. It was pure barbarism, pure frightfulness, deliberately carried out. ... I cannot measure the wicked folly of the proceeding of which they have been guilty. ... I wish I could think that these atrocious crimes were the crimes of a small dominant military caste. I agree that the direction of policy, the direction of national policy, may be in the hands of a small caste, but it is incredible that crimes like these, perpetrated in the light of day, known to all mankind, condemned from one end of the civilized world to the other, should go on being repeated month after month of four years of embittered warfare if it did not commend itself to the population which commits them."
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Prime Ministers of the United KingdomUniversity of Cambridge facultyBritish peersPhilosophers from ScotlandPoliticians from Scotland
Original Language: English
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Speech to a lunch of the English-Speaking Union in the Criterion Restaurant (11 October 1918) after the sinking of the RMS Leinster, quoted in The Times (12 October 1918), p. 2
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_Balfour
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Arthur Balfour
Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, KG, OM, PC (25 July 1848 – 19 March 1930) was a British Conservative statesman and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1902 until 1905. The author of several influential works of philosophy, he was one of the most intellectual prime ministers of the 20th century. As Foreign Secretary he authored the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which supported the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.
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