, far too able a Cabinet Minister to ignore obvious facts, and it
is interesting to note how he disposes of them. Observe the following
passage:

For the drama or tragedy which is moving to its climax in the
Balkans we all have our responsibilities, and none of us can escape
our share of them by blaming others or by blaming the Turk. If
there is any man here who, looking back over the last 35 years,
thinks he knows where to fix the sole responsibility for all the
procrastination and provocation, for all the jealousies and
rivalries, for all the religious and racial animosities, which have
worked together for this result, I do not envy him his
complacency.... Whether we blame the belligerents or criticise the
Powers or sit in sackcloth and ashes ourselves is absolutely of no
consequence at the present moment.

Now if for this tragedy we "all have our responsibility," then what
becomes of his first statement that the war is raging despite all that
rulers and diplomats could do to prevent it? If the war was
"inevitable," and rulers and diplomats have done all they could to
prevent it, neither they nor we have any responsibility for it. He
knows, of course, that it is impossible to deny that responsibility,
that our errors in the past _have_ been due not to any lack of readiness
to fight or quarrel with foreign nations, but precisely to the tendency
to do those things and our _in_disposition to set aside instinctive and
reasonless jealousies and rivalries in favour of a deeper sense of
responsibility and a somewhat longer vision.

But, again, this quite obvious moral, that if we have our
responsibility, if, in other words, we have _not_ done all that we might
and _have_ been led away by temper and passion, we should, in order to
avoid a repetition of such errors in the future, try and see where we
have erred in the past, is precisely the moral that Mr. Churchill does
_not_ draw. Again, it is not the popular line to show with any
definiteness that we have been wrong. An abstract proposition that "we
all have our responsibilities," is, while a formal admission of the
obvious fact also at the same time, an excuse, almost a justification.
You realise Mr. Churchill's method: Having made the necessary admission
of fact, you immediately prevent any unpleasant (or unpopular) practical
conclusion concerning our duty in the matter by talking of the
"complacency" of those who w