Today -100: October 4, 1911: Of dizzy and precarious platforms

British Home Secretary Winston Churchill gives a speech in which he alludes to the increasing number of war scares in Europe lately, but reassures his Dundee constituents that “States and Governments to-day find themselves bound together, interlaced and interwoven one with another, by the tenacious network of trade interests, of commercial transactions, of intercommunication, of reciprocal insurance, and of friendly connection. They find themselves standing upon the dizzy and precarious platform of international credit and complex artificial industry, a platform which, were it to collapse or be violently overturned, would produce consequences which no man and no monarch can foretell.” He adds that the strongest nations – Britain, Germany and France – are those with the most to lose and the furthest to fall in the event of war, so they’ll try to prevent one. So that’s okay then.

Turkey may respond to the Italian attack on Libya by occupying the coast of the Italian colony of Eritrea.