This is not rhetorical exaggeration.

The weapons of offence regularly win in their race with the weapons of defence.

Fortresses that took years to construct are shattered in a day.

The ironclad is sunk by the torpedo.
How very little margin lay between this country and starvation through action of submarines! Suppose the enemy had possessed five times as many submarines from the first, would our defensive measures have prevailed?
How small an extension in the enemy's power in the air would have enabled him in a single night to leave London a mass of ruins, its whole population which had not fled dying in torment from poisonous gases! Another five-and-twenty years of advance in scientific knowledge equal to that of the last five-and-twenty years may easily make such a result possible.
But some man--one of those who never look beyond the next year and their own street, and expects always to carry on business as usual--will say that the nations will be exhausted and tired of war, and this War will be the last.

Dare any country trust to that unless a new spirit is infused into the nations and definite steps are taken to prevent war?
Did those who had the best means of knowledge--the Government of the day--imagine that such a war as this would break out suddenly?
If they did, they would be guilty of a crime almost unparalleled in leaving us so unprepared and fiddling with such questions--"Welsh Disestablishment" and the like--as occupied their time and attention and excited the political controversies of the months and years immediately preceding the War.
Assume even that no new war does break out again actually, dare any nation neglect to keep up its naval and military armaments on a scale far greater than before?
How is the burden to be met when every penny that can be raised as revenue will be needed to meet the charge on our gigantic debt and the necessary claims for carrying on Government, to say nothing of improving the conditions of life?
We cannot, nor can other nations, go on using up capital and borrowing indefinitely.