When Germany challenged us nearly two years ago to uphold with our lives the ideals by which we professed to live, we accepted the challenge, not out of madness, nor for glory or for gain, but to make good those professions. Since then the Allies and our empire have fought that they may be free and all earth may be free from the intolerable domination of German ideals. We did not foresee the size of the task when it opened. We do not flinch from it now that the long months have schooled us to full knowledge and have tempered us nationally and individually to meet it. The nations within the empire have created, maintained, and reinforced from their best the great armies they devote without question to this issue. They have emerged, one by one, as powers clothed with power through discipline and sacrifice, strong for good by their bitter knowledge of the evil they are meeting, and wise in the unpurchasable wisdom of actual achievement. Knowing as nations what it is we fight for, realizing as men and women the resolve that has been added to us by what each has endured, we go forward now under the proud banner of our griefs and losses to greater effort, greater endurance, and, if need be, heavier sacrifice, equal sponsors for the deliverance of mankind.

Rudyard Kipling,
on Empire Day, May 24, 1916.