The decisive communication between Sir Edward Grey and Prince Lichnowsky is recorded in the famous No. 123.  With the rather childish subsequent attempt to minimize No. 123 on the ground that the Prince was merely an amiable nincompoop who did not really represent his fiendish sovereign, neither I nor any other serious person need be concerned.  What is beyond all controversy is that after that conversation Prince Lichnowsky could do nothing but tell the Kaiser that the Entente, having at last got his imperial head in chancery, was not going to let him off on any terms, and that it was now a fight to a finish between the British and German empires.  Then the Kaiser said:  “We are Germans.  God help us!” When a crowd of foolish students came cheering for the war under his windows, he bade them go to the churches and pray.  His telegrams to the Tsar (the omission of which from the penny bluebook is, to say the least, not chivalrous) were dignified and pathetic.  And when the Germans, taking a line from the poet they call “unser Shakespeare,” said:  “Come the four quarters of the world in arms and we shall shock them,” it was, from the romantic militarist point of view, fine.  What Junker-led men could do they have since done to make that thrasonical brag good.  But there is no getting over the fact that, in Tommy Atkins’s phrase, they had asked for it.  Their Junkers, like ours, had drunk to The Day; and they should not have let us choose it after riling us for so many years.  And that is why Sir Edward had a great surprise when he at last owned up in Parliament.

How the Nation Took It.

The moment he said that we could not “stand aside with our arms folded” and see our friend and neighbour France “bombarded and battered,” the whole nation rose to applaud him.  All the Foreign Office distrust of public opinion, the concealment of the Anglo-French plan of campaign, the disguise of the Entente in a quaker’s hat, the duping of the British public and the Kaiser with one and the same prevarication, had been totally unnecessary and unpopular, like most of these ingenuities which diplomatists think subtle and Machiavellian.  The British Public had all along been behind Mr. Winston Churchill.  It had wanted Sir Edward to do just what Sazonoff wanted him to do, and what I, in the columns of The Daily News proposed he should do nine months ago (I must really be allowed to claim that I am not merely wise after the event), which was to arm to the teeth regardless of an expense which to us would have been a mere fleabite, and tell Germany that if she, laid a finger on France we would unite with France to defeat her, offering her at the same time as consolation for that threat, the assurance that we would do as much to France if she wantonly broke the peace in the like fashion by attacking Germany.  No unofficial Englishman worth his salt wanted to snivel hypocritically about our love of peace and our respect for treaties and our solemn acceptance of