act of the case was that
there was no direct connection; the Sarajevo murders were dropped for
two whole weeks out of the general consciousness, they went out of the
papers, they ceased to be discussed; then they were picked up again and
used as an excuse for war. Germany, armed so as to be a threat to all
the world, weary at last of her mighty vigil, watching the course of
events, decided that her moment had come, and snatched the dead archduke
out of his grave again to serve her tremendous ambition.

It may well have seemed to the belligerent German patriot that all her
possible foes were confused, divided within themselves, at an extremity
of distraction and impotence. The British Isles seemed slipping steadily
into civil war. Threat was met by counter-threat, violent fool competed
with violent fool for the admiration of the world, the National
Volunteers armed against the Ulster men; everything moved on with a kind
of mechanical precision from parade and meeting towards the fatal
gun-running of Howth and the first bloodshed in Dublin streets. That
wretched affray, far more than any other single thing, must have
stiffened Germany in the course she had chosen. There can be no doubt of
it; the mischief makers of Ireland set the final confirmation upon the
European war. In England itself there was a summer fever of strikes;
Liverpool was choked by a dockers' strike, the East Anglian agricultural
labourers were in revolt, and the building trade throughout the country
was on the verge of a lockout. Russia seemed to be in the crisis of a
social revolution. From Baku to St. Petersburg there were
insurrectionary movements in the towns, and on the 23rd--the very day of
the Austrian ultimatum--Cossacks were storming barbed wire entanglements
in the streets of the capital. The London Stock Exchange was in a state
of panic disorganisation because of a vast mysterious selling of
securities from abroad. And France, France it seemed was lost to all
other consideration in the enthralling confrontations and denunciations
of the Caillaux murder trial, the trial of the wife of her ex-prime
Minister for the murder of a blackmailing journalist. It was a case full
of the vulgarest sexual violence. Before so piquant a spectacle France
it seemed could have no time nor attention for the revelation of M.
Humbert, the Reporter of the Army Committee, proclaiming that the
artillery was short of ammunition, that her infantry had boots "thirty
yea