Offices and chanceries.  Indeed it could not have been stably solved without certain assurances from them.  But it was, to say the least, as much Germany’s business as anyone else’s, and terribly urgent for her:  “a matter of life and death,” the Imperial Chancellor thought.  Still, it is not for us to claim moral superiority to Germany.  It was for us a matter of the life and death of many Englishmen; and these Englishmen are dead because our diplomatists were as blind as the Prussians.  The war is a failure for secret Junker diplomacy, ours no less than the enemy’s.  Those of us who have still to die must be inspired, not by devotion to the diplomatists, but, like the Socialist hero of old on the barricade, by the vision of “human solidarity.”  And if he purchases victory for that holy cause with his blood, I submit that we cannot decently allow the Foreign Office to hang up his martyr’s palm over the War Office Mantelpiece.

The First Penalty of Disingenuousness.

The Foreign Office, however, can at lease shift its ground, and declare for the good cause instead of belittling it with quibbling excuses.  For see what the first effect of the nonsense about Belgium has been!  It carried with it the inevitable conclusion that when the last German was cleared off Belgian soil, peace-loving England, her reluctant work in this shocking war done, would calmly retire from the conflict, and leave her Allies to finish the deal with Potsdam.  Accordingly, after Mr. Asquith’s oration at the Mansion House, the Allies very properly insisted on our signing a solemn treaty between the parties that they must all stand together to the very end.  A pitifully thin attempt has been made to represent that the mistrusted party was France, and that the Kaiser was trying to buy her off.  All one can say to that is that the people who believe that any French Government dare face the French people now with anything less than Alsace and Lorraine as the price of peace, or that an undefeated and indeed masterfully advancing German Kaiser (as he seemed then) dare offer France such a price, would believe anything.  Of course we had to sign; but if the Prime Minister had not been prevented by his own past from taking the popular line, we should not have been suspected of a possible backing-out when the demands of our sanctimoniousness were satisfied.  He would have known that we are not vindicating a treaty which by accident remains among the fragments of treaties of Paris, of Prague, of Berlin, of all sorts of places and dates, as the only European treaty that has hitherto escaped flat violation:  we are supporting the war as a war on war, on military coercion, on domineering, on bullying, on brute force, on military law, on caste insolence, on what Mrs. Fawcett called insensable deviltry (only to find the papers explaining apologetically that she, as a lady, had of course been alluding to war made by foreigners, not by England).  Some of us, remembering the things we have ourselves said and done, may doubt whether Satan can cast out Satan; but as the job is not exactly one for an unfallen angel, we may as well let him have a try.