a painful duty, and all the rest of the nauseous mixture of school-master’s twaddle, parish magazine cant, and cinematograph melodrama with which we were deluged.  We were perfectly ready to knock the Kaiser’s head off just to teach him that if he thought he was going to ride roughshod over Europe, including our new friends the French, and the plucky little Belgians, he was reckoning without old England.  And in this pugnacious but perfectly straightforward and human attitude the nation needed no excuses because the nation honestly did not know that we were taking the Kaiser at a disadvantage, or that the Franco-Russian alliance had been just as much a menace to peace as the Austro-German one.  But the Foreign Office knew that very well, and therefore began to manufacture superfluous, disingenuous, and rather sickening excuses at a great rate.  The nation had a clean conscience, and was really innocent of any aggressive strategy:  the Foreign Office was redhanded, and did not want to be found out.  Hence its sermons.

Mr. H.G.  Wells Hoists the Country’s Flag.

It was Mr. H.G.  Wells who at the critical moment spoke with the nation’s voice.  When he uttered his electric outburst of wrath against “this drilling, trampling foolery in the heart of Europe” he gave expression to the pent-up exasperation of years of smouldering revolt against swank and domineer, guff and bugaboo, calling itself blood and iron, and mailed fist, and God and conscience and anything else that sounded superb.  Like Nietzsche, we were “fed up” with the Kaiser’s imprisonments of democratic journalists for Majestaetsbeleidigung (monarch disparagement), with his ancestors, and his mission, and his gospel of submission and obedience for poor men, and of authority, tempered by duelling, for rich men.  The world had become sore-headed, and desired intensely that they who clatter the sword shall perish by the sword.  Nobody cared twopence about treaties:  indeed, it was not for us, who had seen the treaty of Berlin torn up by the brazen seizure of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria in 1909, and taken that lying down, as Russia did, to talk about the sacredness of treaties, even if the wastepaper baskets of the Foreign Offices were not full of torn up “scraps of paper,” and a very good thing too; for General von Bernhardi’s assumption that circumstances alter treaties is not a page from Machiavelli:  it is a platitude from the law books.  The man in the street understood little or nothing about Servia or Russia or any of the cards with which the diplomatists were playing their perpetual game of Beggar my Neighbour.  We were rasped beyond endurance by Prussian Militarism and its contempt for us and for human happiness and common sense; and we just rose at it and went for it.  We have set out to smash the Kaiser exactly as we set out to smash the Mahdi.  Mr. Wells never mentioned a treaty.  He said, in effect:  “There stands the monster all freedom-loving men hate; and at last we are going