rases about England's honor and England's obligations we find it
over and over again expressed that England's interests--its own
interests--call for participation in the war, for it is not in
England's interests that a victorious and therefore stronger Germany
should emerge from the war.

"This old principle of England policy--to take as the sole criterion
of its actions its private interests regardless of right, reason, or
considerations of humanity--is expressed in that speech of Gladstone's
in 1870 on Belgian neutrality, from which Sir Edward quoted.

"Mr. Gladstone then declared that he was unable to subscribe to the
doctrine that the simple fact of the existence of a guarantee is
binding on every party thereto, irrespective altogether of the
particular position in which it may find itself at a time when the
occasion for action on the guarantee arrives; and he referred to such
English statesmen as Aberdeen and Palmerston as supporters of his
views.

"England drew the sword," continued the Chancellor, "only because it
believed its own interests demanded it. Just for Belgian neutrality it
would never have entered the war.

"That is what I meant when I told Sir Edward Goschen in that last
interview, when we sat down to talk the matter over privately as man
to man, that among the reasons which had impelled England to go into
the war the Belgian neutrality treaty had for her only the value of a
scrap of paper.

"I may have been a bit excited and aroused," said the Chancellor. "Who
would not have been at seeing the hopes and the work of the whole
period of my Chancellorship going for nought? I recalled to the
Ambassador my efforts for years to bring about an understanding
between England and Germany; an understanding which, I reminded him,
would have made a general European war impossible, and which
absolutely would have guaranteed the peace of Europe.

"Such an understanding," the Chancellor interjected parenthetically,
"would have formed the basis on which we could have approached the
United States as a third partner; but England had not taken up this
plan, and through its entry into the war had destroyed forever the
hope of its fulfillment.

"In comparison with such momentous consequences was the treaty not a
scrap of paper? England ought really to cease harping on this theme of
Belgian neutrality," said the Chancellor. "Documents on the
Anglo-Belgian military agreement which we have found in the meantime
sho