Yet, in spite of these aspirations, great wars have come to England, not once, but at least three times, since these words were spoken, and armaments are immeasurably larger than ever before.

Let us understand one thing clearly in connection with the present war.  Mr. Ponsonby, in the words already quoted, implored Sir E. Grey to “look to the great central interests of humanity and civilisation,” and to preserve the neutrality of England in those interests.  But at the moment at which he spoke the eyes of English statesmen were looking at one thing alone.  It was not a question of what French statesmen expected them to do.  The British Government had explained quite clearly to French statesmen that they must not expect armed support from England.  This fact had been made clear to the French Foreign Office long before in a series of conversations between the statesmen, and it had been embodied in a letter from Sir E. Grey to the French Ambassador.  But when the shadow of war actually fell on France these conversations and this letter faded into the background.  It was no longer a question of what the French President expected from the King of England.  It was a question of what Jacques Roturier, artisan in the streets of Paris, knowing that the Germans were on the frontier and might be dropping their shells into Paris in a fortnight, expected from John Smith, shopkeeper in the East India Dock Road, London, safe behind the English Channel from all the horrors of war.  That was, not rhetorically but in all soberness of fact, the real “international obligation” on August 3, 1914; for though treaties are made by statesmen they are in the long run interpreted, not by statesmen, but by the public opinion which becomes slowly centred on them—­by the hopes and fears of millions of working men and women who have never read the terms of the treaty but to whom it has become the symbol of a friendship on which they can draw in case of need.  The magistrate may write the marriage lines, but the marriage becomes what the husband and wife make it—­a thing far deeper and more binding than any legal contract.

In the light of these considerations, we can establish one point of supreme importance in dealing with foreign policy—­namely, that the causes of war are very different from the immediate occasions of war.  When the British Government, at the outbreak of the present war, published a White Paper containing the diplomatic correspondence between July 20 and August 4, 1914, they were publishing evidence as to the immediate occasion of war—­namely the Austrian ultimatum of July 23 to Serbia which brought on the war.  In the twelve days which intervened between the delivery of that ultimatum and the declaration of war between England and Germany, the negotiations on which hung the immediate fate of Europe were, it is true, conducted by a few leading statesmen.  But it is of little use to argue whether or not these negotiations were conducted ill or well, for they were not the real