ou keep up your sleeve to
stab us in the back when our two most formidable foes are trying to
garotte us? If so, where does your moral superiority come in, hypocrites
that you are? If not, why, we repeat, did you not make them known to all
the world, instead of making an ambush for us by your senseless
silence?"

I see no reply to that except a frank confession that we did not know
our own minds; that we came to a knowledge of them only when Germany's
attack on France forced us to make them up at last; that though
doubtless a chronic state of perfect lucidity and long prevision on our
part would have been highly convenient, yet there is a good deal to be
said for the policy of not fording a stream until you come to it; and
that in any case we must entirely decline to admit that we are more
likely than other people to do the wrong thing when circumstances at
last oblige us to think and act. Also that the discussion is idle on the
shewing of the German case itself; for whether the Germans assumed us to
be unscrupulous Militarists or conscientious Democrats they were bound
to come to the same conclusion: namely, that we should attack them if
they attacked France; consequently their assumption that we would not
interfere must have been based on the belief that we are simply
"contemptible," which is the sort of mistake people have to pay for in
this wicked world.

On the whole, we can hector our way in the Prussian manner out of that
discussion well enough, provided we hold our own in the field. But the
Prussian manner hardly satisfies the conscience. True, the fact that our
diplomatists were not able to discover the right course for Germany does
not excuse Germany for being unable to find it for herself. Not that it
was more her business than ours: it was a European question, and should
have been solved by the united counsels of all the ambassadors and
Foreign Offices and chanceries. Indeed it could not have been stably
solved without certain assurances from them. But it was, to say the
least, as much Germany's business as anyone else's, and terribly urgent
for her: "a matter of life and death," the Imperial Chancellor thought.
Still, it is not for us to claim moral superiority to Germany. It was
for us a matter of the life and death of many Englishmen; and these
Englishmen are dead because our diplomatists were as blind as the
Prussians. The war is a failure for secret Junker diplomacy, ours no
less than the enemy's. Tho