Franco-Russian alliance, it was hard for a German to believe that they were wholly fit for publication.  In short, they would say “If you were so jolly wise and well intentioned before the event, why did not your Foreign Minister and your ambassadors in Berlin and Vienna and St. Petersburg—­we beg pardon, Petrograd—­invite us to keep the peace and rely on western public opinion instead of refusing us every pledge except the hostile one to co-operate with France against us in the North Sea, and making it only too plain to us that your policy was a Junker policy as much as ours, and that we had nothing to hope from your goodwill?  What evidence had we that you were playing any other game than this Militarist chess of our own, which you now so piously renounce, but which none of you except a handful of Socialists whom you despise and Syndicalists whom you imprison on Militarist pretexts has opposed for years past, though it has been all over your Militarist anti-German platforms and papers and magazines?  Are your Social-Democratic principles sincere, or are they only a dagger you keep up your sleeve to stab us in the back when our two most formidable foes are trying to garotte us?  If so, where does your moral superiority come in, hypocrites that you are?  If not, why, we repeat, did you not make them known to all the world, instead of making an ambush for us by your senseless silence?”

I see no reply to that except a frank confession that we did not know our own minds; that we came to a knowledge of them only when Germany’s attack on France forced us to make them up at last; that though doubtless a chronic state of perfect lucidity and long prevision on our part would have been highly convenient, yet there is a good deal to be said for the policy of not fording a stream until you come to it; and that in any case we must entirely decline to admit that we are more likely than other people to do the wrong thing when circumstances at last oblige us to think and act.  Also that the discussion is idle on the shewing of the German case itself; for whether the Germans assumed us to be unscrupulous Militarists or conscientious Democrats they were bound to come to the same conclusion:  namely, that we should attack them if they attacked France; consequently their assumption that we would not interfere must have been based on the belief that we are simply “contemptible,” which is the sort of mistake people have to pay for in this wicked world.

On the whole, we can hector our way in the Prussian manner out of that discussion well enough, provided we hold our own in the field.  But the Prussian manner hardly satisfies the conscience.  True, the fact that our diplomatists were not able to discover the right course for Germany does not excuse Germany for being unable to find it for herself.  Not that it was more her business than ours:  it was a European question, and should have been solved by the united counsels of all the ambassadors and Foreign