few leading statesmen. But it is of little use to argue
whether or not these negotiations were conducted ill or well, for they were
not the real _cause_ of the war. The cause of the war must be sought in the
slow development of forces which can be traced back for years, and even for
centuries. It was comparatively futile for Parliament to discuss whether
this or that despatch or telegram was wise or unwise; the real questions to
be asked were--What produced the crowds in Vienna surging round the Serbian
Legation at the end of June, and round the Russian Embassy at the end of
July; what produced the slow, patient sympathy for the Balkan peoples and
hatred for Austria in the heart of millions of Russian peasants; what
produced the Servian nationalist movement; above all, what produced that
strange sentiment throughout Germany which could honestly regard the
invasion of Belgium as justifiable? To answer those questions we have to
estimate the force of the most heterogeneous factors in history:--for
instance, on the one hand, the slow break-up of the Turkish Empire,
extending over more than two centuries, which has allowed the cauldron of
the Slavonic Balkan peoples to boil up through the thin crust of foreign
domination; and on the other hand, the gradual development of the whole
system of German State education, and the character of the German
newspapers, which have turned the eyes of German public opinion in upon
itself and have excluded from public teaching and from the formation of
thought every breath of fresh air from the outside world, until at last
German public sentiment, through extreme and incessant self-contemplation,
has lost the calmness and simplicity which were once the strength of the
German character. No man can allot the responsibility for these things,
spreading as they do over generations; but assuredly the responsibility
does not rest with the half-dozen Ministers for Foreign Affairs who were in
power in July 1914.

If we are right in what we have said above, then the phrase "the
democratization of foreign policy" takes on a new meaning. It does not
mean merely the introduction into foreign policy of any set of democratic
institutions; it means the realisation by both statesmen and people that
foreign policy is already in its essence a fundamentally democratic thing,
and that the success or failure of any line of action depends not upon the
desires of politicians but upon the mighty forces which move a