st to teach him that if
he thought he was going to ride roughshod over Europe, including our new
friends the French, and the plucky little Belgians, he was reckoning
without old England. And in this pugnacious but perfectly
straightforward and human attitude the nation needed no excuses because
the nation honestly did not know that we were taking the Kaiser at a
disadvantage, or that the Franco-Russian alliance had been just as much
a menace to peace as the Austro-German one. But the Foreign Office knew
that very well, and therefore began to manufacture superfluous,
disingenuous, and rather sickening excuses at a great rate. The nation
had a clean conscience, and was really innocent of any aggressive
strategy: the Foreign Office was redhanded, and did not want to be found
out. Hence its sermons.

*Mr. H.G. Wells Hoists the Country's Flag.*

It was Mr. H.G. Wells who at the critical moment spoke with the nation's
voice. When he uttered his electric outburst of wrath against "this
drilling, trampling foolery in the heart of Europe" he gave expression
to the pent-up exasperation of years of smouldering revolt against swank
and domineer, guff and bugaboo, calling itself blood and iron, and
mailed fist, and God and conscience and anything else that sounded
superb. Like Nietzsche, we were "fed up" with the Kaiser's imprisonments
of democratic journalists for _Majestaetsbeleidigung_ (monarch
disparagement), with his ancestors, and his mission, and his gospel of
submission and obedience for poor men, and of authority, tempered by
duelling, for rich men. The world had become sore-headed, and desired
intensely that they who clatter the sword shall perish by the sword.
Nobody cared twopence about treaties: indeed, it was not for us, who had
seen the treaty of Berlin torn up by the brazen seizure of Bosnia and
Herzegovina by Austria in 1909, and taken that lying down, as Russia
did, to talk about the sacredness of treaties, even if the wastepaper
baskets of the Foreign Offices were not full of torn up "scraps of
paper," and a very good thing too; for General von Bernhardi's
assumption that circumstances alter treaties is not a page from
Machiavelli: it is a platitude from the law books. The man in the street
understood little or nothing about Servia or Russia or any of the cards
with which the diplomatists were playing their perpetual game of Beggar
my Neighbour. We were rasped beyond endurance by Prussian Militarism and
its co