put it in his pocket when he dressed
that night to go out to dinner. And when he sat down at table he found
himself seated next to the able, earnest, and passionately patriotic
Minister for Belgium. Perhaps he was urging some objections to British
intervention, when his neighbour said: "But what about Belgium? You have
promised to protect her, and if you don't do so she will be destroyed."

That raised visions of the work of the little nations; memories of
their immense contributions to human progress from the days of Israel
downwards; thoughts of the vast loss to liberty, to morality, to
religion, and to all the other fruits of the unfettered soul that
would come to the world from the over-riding of the weak peoples by
the strong. The result was swift and sure--the letter in the Minister's
pocket never reached the important person to whom it was addressed.

Only God knows whether this period, however short, of indecision among
our people, and particularly among our responsible statesmen, with the
consequent delay in dispatching a determined warning to Germany ("Hands
off Belgium,") contributed to the making of the war. But it is at least
an evidence of our desire for peace, and a sufficient assurance that
if unseen powers were working on our side also, they were the powers of
good. Yet so strangely do the invisible forces confound the plans of men
that the crowning proof of this came two days later--on August 8, in
the Commons--when our Foreign Minister defined the British position, and
practically declared for war.

It is not idle rumour that the Government went down to the House that
day expecting to be resisted. The sequel was a startling surprise. Sir
Edward Grey's speech was far from a great oration. It gave the effect of
being unprepared as to form, so loosely did the vehicle hang together,
the sentences sometimes coming with strange inexactitude for the tongue
of one whose written word in dispatches has a clarity and precision that
have never been excelled. But it had the supreme qualities of manifest
sincerity and transparent honesty, and it derived its overwhelming
effect from one transcendent characteristic of which the speaker himself
may have been quite unconscious. It spoke to the British Empire as to a
British gentleman. "You can't stand by and do nothing while the friend
by your side is being beaten to his knees. You can't let a mischievous
and unprincipled buccaneer tread into the dust the neighbour w