English gentleman, who meant well as a true patriot and friend of peace; we are quite sure that what he did was fair and right; and we will not listen to any nonsense to the contrary.”  The Congress will reply, “We know nothing about Sir Edward Grey except what he did; and as there is no secret and no question as to what he did, the whole story being recorded by himself, we must hold England responsible for his conduct, whilst taking your word for the fact, which has no importance for us, that his conduct has nothing to do with his character.”

Our Intellectual Laziness.

The general truth of the situation is, as I have spent so much of my life in trying to make the English understand, that we are cursed with a fatal intellectual laziness, an evil inheritance from the time when our monopoly of coal and iron made it possible for us to become rich and powerful without thinking or knowing how; a laziness which is becoming highly dangerous to us now that our monopoly is gone or superseded by new sources of mechanical energy.  We got rich by pursuing our own immediate advantage instinctively; that is, with a natural childish selfishness; and when any question of our justification arose, we found it easy to silence it with any sort of plausible twaddle (provided it flattered us, and did not imply any trouble or sacrifice) provided by our curates at L70 a year, or our journalists at a penny a line, or commercial moralists with axes to grind.  In the end we became fatheaded, and not only lost all intellectual consciousness of what we were doing, and with it all power of objective self-criticism, but stacked up a lumber of pious praises for ourselves which not only satisfied our corrupted and half atrophied consciences, but gave us a sense that there is something extraordinarily ungentlemanly and politically dangerous in bringing these pious phrases to the test of conduct.  We carried Luther’s doctrine of Justification by Faith to the insane point of believing that as long as a man says what we have agreed to accept as the right thing it does not matter in the least what he actually does.  In fact, we do not clearly see why a man need introduce the subject of morals at all, unless there is something questionable to be whitewashed.  The unprejudiced foreigner calls this hypocrisy:  that is why we call him prejudiced.  But I, who have been a poor man in a poor country, understand the foreigner better.

Now from the general to the particular.  In describing the course of the diplomatic negotiations by which our Foreign Office achieved its design of at last settling accounts with Germany at the most favourable moment from the Militarist point of view, I shall have to exhibit our Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs as behaving almost exactly as we have accused the Kaiser of behaving.  Yet I see him throughout as an honest gentleman, “perplexed in the extreme,” meaning well, revolted at the last moment by the horror of war, clinging to the hope that in some vague way