d not say so definitely, the impression was conveyed that
the mission on which Colonel House was engaged was an unnecessary one--a
preparation against a danger that did not exist. Colonel House attempted
to persuade Sir Edward Grey to visit the Kiel regatta, which was to take
place in a few days, see the Kaiser, and discuss the plan with him. But
the Government feared that such a visit would be very disturbing to
France and Russia. Already Mr. Churchill's proposal for a "naval
holiday" had so wrought up the French that a hurried trip to France by
Mr. Asquith had been necessary to quiet them; the consternation that
would have been caused in Paris by the presence of Sir Edward Grey at
Kiel can only be imagined. The fact that the British statesmen
entertained so little apprehension of a German attack may possibly be a
reflection on their judgment; yet Colonel House's visit has great
historical value, for the experience afterward convinced him that Great
Britain had had no part in bringing on the European war, and that
Germany was solely responsible. It certainly should have put the Wilson
Administration right on this all-important point, when the great storm
broke.

The most vivid recollection which the British statesmen whom Colonel
House met retain of his visit, was his consternation at the spirit that
had confronted him everywhere in Germany. The four men most
interested--Sir Edward Grey, Sir William Tyrrell, Mr. Page, and Colonel
House--met at luncheon in the American Embassy a few days after
President Wilson's emissary had returned from Berlin. Colonel House
could talk of little except the preparations for war which were manifest
on every hand.

"I feel as though I had been living near a mighty electric dynamo,"
Colonel House told his friends. "The whole of Germany is charged with
electricity. Everybody's nerves are tense. It needs only a spark to set
the whole thing off."

The "spark" came two weeks afterward with the assassination of the
Archduke Ferdinand.

* * * * *

"It is all a bad business," Colonel House wrote to Page when war broke
out, "and just think how near we came to making such a catastrophe
impossible! If England had moved a little faster and had let me go back
to Germany, the thing, perhaps, could have been done."

To which Page at once replied:

"No, no, no--no power on earth could have prevented it. The German
militarism, which is _the_ crime of the last fifty