Besides, there was another difficulty.  Mr. Asquith himself, though serenely persuaded that he is a Liberal statesman, is, in effect, very much what the Kaiser would have been if he had been a Yorkshireman and a lawyer, instead of being only half English and the other half Hohenzollern, and an anointed emperor to boot.  As far as popular liberties are concerned, history will make no distinction between Mr. Asquith and Metternich.  He is forced to keep on the safe academic ground of Belgium by the very obvious consideration that if he began to talk of the Kaiser’s imprisonments of editors and democratic agitators and so forth, a Homeric laughter, punctuated with cries of, “How about Denshawai?” “What price Tom Mann?” “Votes for women!” “Been in India lately?” “Make McKenna Kaiser,” “Or dear old Herbert Gladstone,” etc., etc., would promptly spoil that pose.  The plain fact is that, Militarism apart, Germany is in many ways more democratic in practice than England; indeed the Kaiser has been openly reviled as a coward by his Junkers because he falls short of Mr. Asquith in calm indifference to Liberal principles and blank ignorance of working-class sympathies, opinions, and interests.

Mr. Asquith had also to distract public attention from the fact that three official members of his Government, all men of unquestioned and conspicuous patriotism and intellectual honesty, walked straight out into private life on the declaration of war.  One of them, Mr. John Burns, did so at an enormous personal sacrifice, and has since maintained a grim silence far more eloquent than the famous speech Germany invented for him.  It is not generally believed that these three statesmen were actuated by a passion for the violation of Belgian neutrality.

On the whole, it was impossible for the Government to seize its grand chance and put itself at the head of the popular movement that responded to Sir Edward Grey’s declaration:  the very simple reason being that the Government does not represent the nation, and is in its sympathies just as much a Junker government as the Kaiser’s.  And so, what the Government cannot do has to be done by unofficial persons with clean and brilliant anti-Junker records like Mr. Wells, Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Neil Lyons, and Mr. Jerome K. Jerome.  Neither Mr. Asquith nor Sir Edward Grey can grasp, as these real spokesmen of their time do, the fact that we just simply want to put an end to Potsdamnation, both at home and abroad.  Both of them probably think Potsdam a very fine and enviable institution, and want England to out-Potsdam Potsdam and to monopolize the command of the seas; a monstrous aspiration.  We, I take it, want to guarantee that command of the sea which is the common heritage of mankind to the tiniest State and the humblest fisherman that depends on the sea for a livelihood.  We want the North Sea to be as safe for everybody, English or German, as Portland Place.

The Need for Recrimination.