an diplomats in London
during the fatal week preceding the war were a positive aid to the
catastrophe that was about to take place. They blundered as hard and as
heavily as it was possible to blunder; going to the wrong people;
despising the subtly powerful; paying court to the more advertised and
less controlling of the English public men, and in a word behaving
themselves after that fashion for which we have coined the adjective
"newspaper."

There was further the peculiar aggravation of the tone in which the
Austrian note had been addressed to Servia. There was further the
patent and almost puerile double dealing of Berlin in the attempted
negotiations for peace between Russia and Austria--in which negotiations
the British Cabinet was very prominent. But beyond all these other minor
points, these three causes I have mentioned, by their convergence, seem
to have determined England's participation in the war, with all the
enormous but as yet unguessed consequences that will follow therefrom.

I repeat, I do not say that any one of those three causes would in
itself have been sufficient. The three combining were just sufficient,
and this account, if I am not mistaken, justly presents the picture that
history should have of the manner in which Great Britain determined to
conclude the long process of her recent diplomatic revolution and to
engage with the Allies against the German Empire and the Hapsburg house,
which the German Empire tows in its wake.

AT THE VILLA ACHILLEION CORFU.

By H.T. SUDDUTH.

A haunting presence seems to fill the air,
A shade of grandeur gone and e'er to be
One with the legends of the Ionian Sea--
One memory more linked with Corcyra fair,
Disjoined, alas! from presence otherwhere--
A lost illusion of the years once free
And glorious in the kindling memory
Of grand Homeric Past still lingering there!

The olive orchards crown the hills; the vine
And rose still flourish on the sunny slopes
As in Alcinous' Gardens; Morning opes
Her eyes irradiant with the dawn divine!
But now no longer at Achilleion
The Kaiser wakes to see fair Eos dawn.

In Belgian or in Russian lands afar,
Beneath the smoke-cloud cope of shrouded Heaven
Where hissing shot and shell and War's red levin
Spread far and wide the canopy of War!
Where Nature shudders and seems to abhor
The awful scene; where myria