, but at
all events out of Belgium. A like request would, of course, be addressed
to Britain and to France at the same time. The technical correctness of
our diplomatic position as to Belgium may be unimpeachable; but as the
effect of our shells on Belgium is precisely the same as that of the
German shells, and as by fighting on Belgian soil we are doing her
exactly the same injury that we should have done her if the violation of
her neutrality had been initiated by us instead of by Germany, we could
not decently refuse to fall in with a general evacuation.

*A Certain Result of Intervention.*

At all events, your intervention could not fail to produce at least the
result that even if the belligerents refused to comply, your request
would leave them in an entirely new and very unpleasant relation to
public opinion. No matter how powerful a State is, it is not above
feeling the vast difference between doing something that nobody condemns
and something that everybody condemns except the interested parties.

That difference alone would be well worth your pains. But it is by no
means a foregone conclusion that a blank refusal would be persisted in.
Germany must be aware that the honor of England is now so bound up with
the complete redemption of Belgium from the German occupation that to
keep Antwerp and Brussels she must take Portsmouth and London. France is
no less deeply engaged. You can judge better than I what chance Germany
now has, or can persuade herself she has, of exhausting or overwhelming
her western enemies without ruining herself in the attempt. Whatever
else the war and its horrors may have done or not done, you will agree
with me that it has made an end of the dreams of military and naval
steam-rollering in which the whole wretched business began. At a cost
which the conquest of a whole continent would hardly justify, these
terrible armaments and the heroic hosts which wield them push one
another a few miles back and forward in a month, and take and retake
some miserable village three times over in less than a week. Can you
doubt that though we have lost all fear of being beaten, (our darkened
towns, and the panics of our papers, with their endless scares and silly
inventions, are mere metropolitan hysteria,) we are getting very tired
of a war in which, having now re-established our old military
reputation, and taught the Germans that there is no future for their
empire without our friendship and that of