ber, 1914.

E. GREY, his Britannic Majesty's
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.

PAUL CAMBON, Ambassador Extraordinary
and Plenipotentiary of the French Republic.

BENCKENDORFF, Ambassador Extraordinary
and Plenipotentiary of his
Majesty the Emperor of Russia.

* * * * *

A COUNTERSTROKE.

Semi-Official Statement in The London Times, Sept. 6.

The declaration of the Allied Governments that they will not conclude
peace separately during the war or demand terms of peace without
previous agreement with each other is an opportune counterstroke to the
campaign initiated by Germany for the purpose of detaching France from
Russia and especially from Britain. Overtures in this sense have
doubtless been made to France.

The German Government has not yet realized the strength of the moral
forces it has ranged against itself by its wanton attack upon European
civilization. It appears to imagine that, after having been sufficiently
"punished" for her temerity in opposing the Kaiser's hosts, France would
be open to a bargain, under which she would be "let off" lightly on
condition that she should agree to become the ally of Germany.

This idea has been clearly expressed of late in the German press. It is
based on the belief that the war was prepared by skillful British
intrigues inspired by jealousy of Germany. German statesmen cannot
conceive that nations should fight for any cause loftier than material
"interests." Hence the constant mistakes of their diplomacy and its
failure to foresee that little Belgium would resist German pretensions
or that England would go to war for "a scrap of paper." Now they imagine
that the determination of France to fight to the last in defense of her
honor and her superior civilization can be undermined by an offer to
mitigate the material losses she may suffer from the war.

The German view was most clearly expressed in the remarkable dispatch to
the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant from its Berlin correspondent, which
was reproduced in The Times of yesterday. Politicians in Berlin, he
wrote,

see in England the land which has brought about the outbreak of the
war by finely played intrigue, in order to let dangerous Russia
bleed herself to death, to the end that against Germany, even a
victorio