he could persuade everybody to be reasonable if they would only come and talk to him as they did when the big Powers were kept out of the Balkan war, but hopelessly destitute of a positive policy of any kind, and therefore unable to resist those who had positive business in hand.  And do not for a moment imagine that I think that the conscious Sir Edward Grey was Othello, and the subconscious, Iago.  I do think that the Foreign Office, of which Sir Edward is merely the figure head, was as deliberately and consciously bent on a long deferred Militarist war with Germany as the Admiralty was; and that is saying a good deal.  If Sir Edward Grey did not know what he wanted, Mr. Winston Churchill was in no such perplexity.  He was not an “ist” of any sort, but a straightforward holder of the popular opinion that if you are threatened you should hit out, unless you are afraid to.  Had he had the conduct of the affair he might quite possibly have averted the war (and thereby greatly disappointed himself and the British public) by simply frightening the Kaiser.  As it was, he had arranged for the co-operation of the French and British fleets; was spoiling for the fight; and must have restrained himself with great difficulty from taking off his coat in public whilst Mr. Asquith and Sir Edward Grey were giving the country the assurances which were misunderstood to mean that we were not bound to go to war, and not more likely to do so than usual.  But though Sir Edward did not clear up the misunderstanding, I think he went to war with the heavy heart of a Junker Liberal (such centaurs exist) and not with the exultation of a Junker Jingo.

I may now, without more than the irreducible minimum of injustice to Sir Edward Grey, proceed to tell the story of the diplomatic negotiations as they will appear to the Congress which, I am assuming, will settle the terms on which Europe is to live more or less happily ever after.

Diplomatic History of the War.

The evidence of how the Junker diplomatists of our Foreign Office let us in for the war is in the White Paper, Miscellaneous No. 6 (1914), containing correspondence respecting the European crisis, and since reissued, with a later White Paper and some extra matter, as a penny bluebook in miniature.  In these much-cited and little-read documents we see the Junkers of all the nations, the men who have been saying for years “It’s bound to come,” and clamouring in England for compulsory military service and expeditionary forces, momentarily staggered and not a little frightened by the sudden realization that it has come at last.  They rush round from foreign office to embassy, and from embassy to palace, twittering “This is awful.  Can’t you stop it?  Won’t you be reasonable?  Think of the consequences,” etc., etc.  One man among them keeps his head and looks the facts in the face.  That man is Sazonoff, the Russian Secretary for Foreign Affairs.  He keeps steadily trying to make Sir