tempers, national egotisms, and reciprocal ignorances.

*Delicate Position of Mr. Asquith.*

It seemed a splendid chance for the Government to place itself at the
head of the nation. But no British Government within my recollection has
ever understood the nation. Mr. Asquith, true to the Gladstonian
tradition (hardly just to Gladstone, by the way) that a Liberal Prime
Minister should know nothing concerning foreign politics and care less,
and calmly insensible to the real nature of the popular explosion, fell
back on 1839, picking up the obvious barrister's point about the
violation of the neutrality of Belgium, and tried the equally obvious
barrister's claptrap about "an infamous proposal" on the jury. He
assured us that nobody could have done more for peace than Sir Edward
Grey, though the rush to smash the Kaiser was the most popular thing Sir
Edward had ever done.

Besides, there was another difficulty. Mr. Asquith himself, though
serenely persuaded that he is a Liberal statesman, is, in effect, very
much what the Kaiser would have been if he had been a Yorkshireman and a
lawyer, instead of being only half English and the other half
Hohenzollern, and an anointed emperor to boot. As far as popular
liberties are concerned, history will make no distinction between Mr.
Asquith and Metternich. He is forced to keep on the safe academic ground
of Belgium by the very obvious consideration that if he began to talk of
the Kaiser's imprisonments of editors and democratic agitators and so
forth, a Homeric laughter, punctuated with cries of, "How about
Denshawai?" "What price Tom Mann?" "Votes for women!" "Been in India
lately?" "Make McKenna Kaiser," "Or dear old Herbert Gladstone," etc.,
etc., would promptly spoil that pose. The plain fact is that, Militarism
apart, Germany is in many ways more democratic in practice than England;
indeed the Kaiser has been openly reviled as a coward by his Junkers
because he falls short of Mr. Asquith in calm indifference to Liberal
principles and blank ignorance of working-class sympathies, opinions,
and interests.

Mr. Asquith had also to distract public attention from the fact that
three official members of his Government, all men of unquestioned and
conspicuous patriotism and intellectual honesty, walked straight out
into private life on the declaration of war. One of them, Mr. John
Burns, did so at an enormous personal sacrifice, and has since
maintained a grim silence far more el