ish
Navy free to guard the North Sea, and to face the new and growing German
naval force.

Now, it must always be borne in mind that these arrangements, large and
small, detailed and general, whereby Great Britain gradually involved
herself in a network of French and Russian supports and reciprocal
duties, never took the form of an alliance. The utmost pains were taken
by English diplomatists and permanent officials at the English Foreign
Office, experts and servants, to state that England remained free in
spite of all to act as her conscience or her interest might dictate,
whenever, or if, war should break out between the two groups of
Continental powers. No one can read the conflict of evidence between the
German Ambassador and Sir Edward Grey in the highly typical telephone
incident which took place immediately before the recent declaration of
war without seeing that liberty of action was maintained by the
Government of Great Britain until the very last moment.

But one cannot do a number of things, each weighted with a similar
tendency, without one's whole conduct and fate being determined in the
direction to which those actions tend. To preserve one's legal or
technical independence is not enough. In this specific case, for
instance, the naval arrangement proved an exceedingly weighty thing.
France could say:

"Relying on your explicit, though not expressed, support of myself and
Russia, I guarded your trade routes in the Mediterranean and left my
northern coasts undefended. Here is war about to break out with those
northern coasts of mine bare against the overwhelming attack from the
German fleet, and with nothing wherewith I can guard it; and that
nakedness is entirely due to having trusted you. You may not have a
legal obligation, but the moral one is not to be shirked."

At any rate, I insist upon the tendency of all these various diplomatic
acts, because it has been they that might have dragged the most
reluctant Government into this conflict, and it was they which, in
combination with the cardinal policy of preventing maritime rivalry in
the narrow seas, decided the present policy of this country.

3. But, as I have said, there was a third cause, much vaguer and, until
war actually broke out, of little effect. Though there had existed for
thirty years from 1880 until after the beginning of the new century such
strong bonds of sympathy between Great Britain and North Germany--bonds
riveted by Court influ