ch have provoked it and which it is its object to terminate, would so
far as human reason can judge at all have been brought to an end
generations since? Do we quite realise that _we_ are in large part
responsible, not merely for the war, but for the long agony of horror
which have provoked it and made it necessary; that when we talk of the
jealousies and rivalries of the Powers as playing so large a part in the
responsibility for these things, we represent, perhaps, the chief among
those jealousies and rivalries? That it is not mainly the Turk nor the
Russian nor the Austrian which has determined the course of history in
the Balkan peninsular since the middle of the 19th century, but we
Englishmen--the country gentleman obsessed by vague theories of the
Balance of Power and heaven knows what, reading his _Times_ and barking
out his preposterous politics over the dinner table? That this fatal
policy was dictated simply by fear of the growth of "Russian barbarism
and autocracy" and "the overshadowing of the Western nations by a
country whose institutions are inimical to our own"? That while we were
thus led into war by a phantom danger to our Indian possessions, we were
quite blind to the real danger which threatened them, which a year or
two later, in the Mutiny, nearly lost us them and which were not due to
the machinations of a rival power but to our own misgovernment; that
this very "barbaric growth" and expansion towards India which we fought
a war to check we are now actively promoting in Persia and elsewhere by
our (effective) alliance? That while as recently as fifteen years ago we
would have gone to war to prevent any move of Russia towards the Indian
frontier, we are to-day actually encouraging her to build a railway
there? And that it is now another nation which stands as the natural
barrier to Russian expansion to the West--Germany--whose power we are
challenging, and that all tendencies point to our backing again the
wrong horse, to our fighting _with_ the "semi-Asiatic barbarian" (as our
fathers used to call him) against the nation which has close racial and
cultural affinity to our own, just as half a century since the same
fatal obsession about the "Balance of Power" led us to fight with the
Mohammedan in order to bolster up for half a century his anti-Christian
rule.

The misreading of history in this matter is, unfortunately, not
possible. The point upon which in the Crimean war the negotiations with
Ru