nce to war against Germany. Mr. Shaw
thinks that thus the German "bluff" would have been called and war would
have been prevented, and he is confident that Mr. Winston Churchill
would have taken the Bismarck tone and dictated the result. He cannot
see--what is really the essential fact in both cases--that Sir Edward
Grey was striving in every honorable way to preserve peace, that his
Government refused to stand idle and see France crushed in the same
spirit that it refused to menace Germany until a definite and undeniable
cause of war arose.

That cause came with Germany's violation of its pledge to observe the
neutrality of Belgium, and England's response excites Mr. Shaw's most
furious contempt. He adopts with zest the judgment of the German
Chancellor. The pledge for all who signed it was but a scrap of paper,
of no more binding force than others that had gone their way to dusty
death in the diplomatic waste baskets. To observe the obligation it
imposed was hypocrisy. To fight in order to compel Germany to observe it
was crass militarism. Plainly, Mr. Shaw is a little difficult. The
Government under which he lives is either too bellicose or not bellicose
enough; too ready to help France if France is attacked or not ready
enough to bully Germany, and especially it is all wrong about Belgium
and its treaty, since treaties have several times been broken, and so on
through a bewildering circle of contradictory statements and notions.

Mr. Shaw finds little to choose between the groups of combatants. He
distinctly prides himself on his impartiality, not to say indifference.
On account of his Irish birth he claims something of the detachment of a
foreigner, but admits a touch of Irish malice in taking the conceit out
of the English. Add to this his professed many-sidedness as a dramatist
and playwright and we get as good an explanation as can be given of this
noted writer's attitude toward the tremendous struggle now waging. But
Mr. Shaw's assumption of even-handed scorn for every one concerned, of
"six of one and a half dozen of the other," does not hold out. He feels
profoundly that such fighting as Germany does, for such a purpose as
inspires Germany, must be met by force, and that England could not in
the long run, no matter by whom guided or governed, have shirked the
task laid upon her. That being the case, one wonders a little why it was
worth while to cover every one with ridicule and to present a picture of
Great