HC Deb 04 March 1902 vol 104 cc369-70

But before I proceed to touch upon the policy to which I shall ask the earnest attention of the House, I must say one word on the last subject, which has occupied our attention before, and on which we have already had several debates. We have reached a stage in the history of the war in South Africa when it begins to be possible for the House and the country to judge how the early stages of the war were conducted. There is a universal interest in and a general desire to know details in this matter; but at the same time I hope that if I, representing an already very heavily worked Department, find it impossible to satisfy all the demands that are made upon us in that respect, I may be acquitted of any desire either to shield anybody who should not be shielded or to preserve from the public view any facts which ought to be brought before them. There can be no individual in this country who has so large a stake and so great an interest in the purification of his Department from all suspicion as the Secretary of State. There are two points which I should like to bring before the attention of Parliament, and one is this—that in judging these matters we must not forget at this stage of the war that those gentlemen who sat on that side of the House and those who are responsible on this Bench never contemplated that a war would be carried on on the scale of the one in which we are now engaged. You cannot suddenly make a system which was provided to send out 70,000 men do the work of sending out nearly quadruple that number; and, rightly or wrongly—whether the war was well begun or badly begun—we had to expand in some respects not ten times or 100 times, but 500 or 1,000 times the resources with which we were provided.

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