ehaving almost exactly as we have
accused the Kaiser of behaving. Yet I see him throughout as an honest
gentleman, "perplexed in the extreme," meaning well, revolted at the
last moment by the horror of war, clinging to the hope that in some
vague way he could persuade everybody to be reasonable if they would
only come and talk to him as they did when the big Powers were kept out
of the Balkan war, but hopelessly destitute of a positive policy of any
kind, and therefore unable to resist those who had positive business in
hand. And do not for a moment imagine that I think that the conscious
Sir Edward Grey was Othello, and the subconscious, Iago. I do think that
the Foreign Office, of which Sir Edward is merely the figure head, was
as deliberately and consciously bent on a long deferred Militarist war
with Germany as the Admiralty was; and that is saying a good deal. If
Sir Edward Grey did not know what he wanted, Mr. Winston Churchill was
in no such perplexity. He was not an "ist" of any sort, but a
straightforward holder of the popular opinion that if you are threatened
you should hit out, unless you are afraid to. Had he had the conduct of
the affair he might quite possibly have averted the war (and thereby
greatly disappointed himself and the British public) by simply
frightening the Kaiser. As it was, he had arranged for the co-operation
of the French and British fleets; was spoiling for the fight; and must
have restrained himself with great difficulty from taking off his coat
in public whilst Mr. Asquith and Sir Edward Grey were giving the country
the assurances which were misunderstood to mean that we were not bound
to go to war, and not more likely to do so than usual. But though Sir
Edward did not clear up the misunderstanding, I think he went to war
with the heavy heart of a Junker Liberal (such centaurs exist) and not
with the exultation of a Junker Jingo.

I may now, without more than the irreducible minimum of injustice to Sir
Edward Grey, proceed to tell the story of the diplomatic negotiations as
they will appear to the Congress which, I am assuming, will settle the
terms on which Europe is to live more or less happily ever after.

*Diplomatic History of the War.*

The evidence of how the Junker diplomatists of our Foreign Office let us
in for the war is in the White Paper, Miscellaneous No. 6 (1914),
containing correspondence respecting the European crisis, and since
reissued, with a later White Paper an