"In the welter of sentimentality, amid which Great Britain might easily have mouldered into ruin, my valued colleague, Lord Haldane, presented a figure alike interesting, individual, and arresting. In speech fluent and even infinite he yielded to no living idealist in the easy coinage of sentimental phraseology. Here, indeed, he was a match for those who distributed the chloroform of Berlin. Do we not remember, for instance, that Germany was his spiritual home? But he none the less prepared himself, and the Empire, to talk when the time came with his spiritual friends in language not in the least spiritual. He devised the Territorial Army, which was capable of becoming the easy nucleus of national conscription, and which unquestionably ought to have been used for that purpose at the outbreak of war. He created the Imperial General Staff. He founded the Officers' Training Corps."
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Liberal Party (UK) politiciansLawyers from ScotlandLabour Party (UK) politiciansPoliticians from ScotlandFellows of the British Academy
Original Language: English
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Lord Birkenhead, Idealism in International Politics: A Rectorial Address, Delivered on November 3rd, 1923 (n.d.), p. 9
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Haldane%2C_1st_Viscount_Haldane
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Richard Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane
Richard Burdon Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane KT OM PC FRS FSA FBA (30 July 1856 – 19 August 1928) was a British lawyer and philosopher and an influential Liberal and later Labour politician. He was Secretary of State for War between 1905 and 1912 during which time the "Haldane Reforms" of the British Army were implemented. As an intellectual he was fascinated with German thought. That led to his role in seeking detente with Germany in 1912 in the [[w:Haldane Mission|Haldane Mis
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