stream of causes depends not on individuals who, like the mass of
mankind, are carried on by a destiny which no murder has ever been able
to placate, divert, or arrest.

In July of last year I was a stranger in a strange city in the Midlands
and particularly out of touch with the world's politics. Never a very
diligent reader of newspapers, there were at that time reasons of a
private order which caused me to be even less informed than usual on
public affairs as presented from day to day in that necessarily
atmosphereless, perspectiveless manner of the daily papers, which
somehow, for a man possessed of some historic sense, robs them of all
real interest. I don't think I had looked at a daily for a month past.

But though a stranger in a strange city I was not lonely, thanks to a
friend who had travelled there out of pure kindness to bear me company in
a conjuncture which, in a most private sense, was somewhat trying.

It was this friend who, one morning at breakfast, informed me of the
murder of the Archduke Ferdinand.

The impression was mediocre. I was barely aware that such a man existed.
I remembered only that not long before he had visited London. The
recollection was rather of a cloud of insignificant printed words his
presence in this country provoked.

Various opinions had been expressed of him, but his importance was
Archducal, dynastic, purely accidental. Can there be in the world of
real men anything more shadowy than an Archduke? And now he was no more;
removed with an atrocity of circumstances which made one more sensible of
his humanity than when he was in life. I connected that crime with
Balkanic plots and aspirations so little that I had actually to ask where
it had happened. My friend told me it was in Serajevo, and wondered what
would be the consequences of that grave event. He asked me what I
thought would happen next.

It was with perfect sincerity that I answered "Nothing," and having a
great repugnance to consider murder as a factor of politics, I dismissed
the subject. It fitted with my ethical sense that an act cruel and
absurd should be also useless. I had also the vision of a crowd of
shadowy Archdukes in the background, out of which one would step forward
to take the place of that dead man in the light of the European stage.
And then, to speak the whole truth, there was no man capable of forming a
judgment who attended so little to the march of events as I did at that
time.