No Quarrel With Germany — Asquith

New York Times 100 years ago today, July 26, 1912:
Premier Announces That the 'Conversations' Begun by Lord Haldane Continue.
BRITAIN'S NEED OF PEACE
It Is the Greatest of Her Interests, Says Prime Minister — Cost of Armaments 'Lamentable'.
    LONDON, July 25.— An Important statement on international relations was made by Premier Asquith in the House of Commons this afternoon in connection with the estimates for the Committee of Imperial Defense.
    For the past decade, Mr. Asquith said, international relations had been undergoing construction on perfectly settled and definite lines. He continued:
    "We have cultivated with great and growing cordiality on both sides our special international friendships. They have stood the test of time and the test of bad as well as of good weather, and questions which ten or fifteen years ago might have caused ill-feeling or worse now yield smoothly to mutual accommodation in perfect good-will.
    "But our friendship for them is not in any sense exclusive. I say deliberately that we have no cause for quarreling with any country in any part of the world. We view without the least suspicion and with perfect equanimity such special conversations as that between the Emperor of Russia and the German Emperor. Our relations with the great German Empire are relations of amity and good-will."
    The Premier stated that the "conversations" started at Berlin by Viscount Haldane, former Secretary of State for War and now Lord High Chancellor, had been afterward continued "in a spirit of frankness and friendship on both sides." He added a word of welcome to the "distinguished diplomatist," Baron Marschall von Bleberstein, the new German Ambassador at London.
    "The greatest of British Interests," the Prime Minister said, "remains the peace of the world. If, as is unhappily the case, there is in this country, as elsewhere, a growing and lamentable expenditure on armaments, both naval and military, there is no power in the world which does not know perfectly well that, so far as we are concerned and so far as we are compelled to partake In that expenditure, we have no aggressive purpose. We covet no heritage. We have no inclination or any temptation to extend in any way the range of our responsibilites."
    The Premier, pointing out that Great Britain's responsibilities were world-wide, concluded:
    "I am stating what is absolutely and literally the fact when I say that this expenditure is regarded by us simply as a necessary insurance of the enormous interests of which the Government of this country and the House of Commons are or ought to be the faithful and vigilant trustees."
    The Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Sir Edward Grey, expressed the belief that there were forces at work which would influence the expenditure on armaments and diminish the prospect of war. He said that the increase in the financial burden would make itself felt, and, as armaments increased, it would more and more be impressed on the people that to use for war the enormous machinery which had been created was bound to produce financial catastrophe.
    The Foreign Secretary reminded the House that nothing caused more suspicion in the public mind in Germany than the idea that proposals were being made to the German Government for a limitation of armaments.