ing Armageddon: a slender
one, but worth trying. You averted war in the Algeciras crisis, and
again in the Agadir crisis, by saying you would fight. Try it again. The
Kaiser is stiffnecked because he does not believe you are going to fight
this time. Well, convince him that you are. The odds against him will
then be so terrible that he may not dare to support the Austrian
ultimatum to Servia at such a price. And if Austria is thus forced to
proceed judicially against Servia, we Russians will be satisfied; and
there will be no war."

Sir Edward could not see it. He is a member of a Liberal Government, in
a country where there is no political career for the man who does not
put his party's tenure of office before every other consideration. What
would _The Daily News_ and _The Manchester Guardian_ have said had he,
Bismarck-like, said bluntly: "If war once breaks out, the old score
between England and Prussia will be settled, not by ambassadors' tea
parties and Areopaguses, but by blood and iron?" In vain did Sazonoff
repeat, "But if you are going to fight, as you know you are, why not say
so?" Sir Edward, being Sir Edward and not Winston Churchill or Lloyd
George, could not admit that he was going to fight. He might have
forestalled the dying Pope and his noble Christian "I bless peace" by a
noble, if heathen, "I fight war." Instead, he persuaded us all that he
was under no obligation whatever to fight. He persuaded Germany that he
had not the slightest serious intention of fighting. Sir Owen Seaman
wrote in _Punch_ an amusing and witty No-Intervention poem. Sporting
Liberals offered any odds that there would be no war for England. And
Germany, confident that with Austria's help she could break France with
one hand and Russia with the other if England held aloof, let Austria
throw the match into the magazine.

*The Battery Unmasked.*

Then the Foreign Office, always acting through its amiable and popular
but confused instrument Sir Edward, unmasked the Junker-Militarist
battery. He suddenly announced that England must take a hand in the war,
though he did not yet tell the English people so, it being against the
diplomatic tradition to tell them anything until it is too late for them
to object. But he told the German Ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky, caught
in a death trap, pleaded desperately for peace with Great Britain. Would
we promise to spare Germany if Belgium were left untouched? No. Would we
say on what conditio