Last Saturday afternoon Mr. Asquith addressed an audience of delegates
from all quarters of Fife at the Masonic: Hall, Ladybank. The Prime Minister, after treating in a jocular vein the " strange credulity" which inspired the "ridiculous legend" of a Government plot to provoke Ulster to immediate armed resistance, briefly described the events which had led to his assumption of the post of War Minister. The resigna- tions, he declared, were due to genuine misunderstandings. He paid a handsome tribute to "the zeal, the devotion to duty, the sense of responsibility, the settled traditions of discipline and honour," which pervade and animate the military as well as the naval forces of the Crown. The Army was not, and he prayed that it might never become, a political instrument. He quoted with approval the elder Pitt's declaration in the Commons that they were "not to suffer our armies to prescribe laws to the Legislature, or to govern those by-whose authority they subsist." He then went on to say: "The Army will hear nothing of politics from me, and in return I expect to hear nothing of polities from the Army." The Army was in no sense a branch of the police, and under normal conditions its aid could not and ought not to be invoked by the civil power.
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