made a descent on your continent under circumstances which made it essential to the maintenance of your national freedom that you should move an army through Canada, you would ask our leave to do so, and take it by force if we did not grant it.  You may reasonably suspect, even if all our statesmen raise a shriek of denial, that we should take a similar liberty under similar circumstances in the teeth of all the scraps of paper in our Foreign Office dustbin.  You see, I am frank with you, and fair, I hope, to Germany.  But a right of way is not a right of conquest; and even the right of way was not, as the Imperial Chancellor imagined, a matter of life and death at all, but a militarist hallucination, and one that has turned out, so far, a military mistake.  In short, there was no such case of overwhelming necessity as would have made the denial of a right of way to the German Army equivalent to a refusal to save German independence from destruction, and therefore to an act of war against her, justifying a German conquest of Belgium.  You can therefore leave the abstract question of international rights of way quite unprejudiced by your action.  You can leave every question between the belligerents fully open, and yet, in the common interest of the world, ask Germany to clear out of Belgium, into France or across the Channel, if she can, back home if she can force no other passage, but at all events out of Belgium.  A like request would, of course, be addressed to Britain and to France at the same time.  The technical correctness of our diplomatic position as to Belgium may be unimpeachable; but as the effect of our shells on Belgium is precisely the same as that of the German shells, and as by fighting on Belgian soil we are doing her exactly the same injury that we should have done her if the violation of her neutrality had been initiated by us instead of by Germany, we could not decently refuse to fall in with a general evacuation.

A Certain Result of Intervention.

At all events, your intervention could not fail to produce at least the result that even if the belligerents refused to comply, your request would leave them in an entirely new and very unpleasant relation to public opinion.  No matter how powerful a State is, it is not above feeling the vast difference between doing something that nobody condemns and something that everybody condemns except the interested parties.

That difference alone would be well worth your pains.  But it is by no means a foregone conclusion that a blank refusal would be persisted in.  Germany must be aware that the honor of England is now so bound up with the complete redemption of Belgium from the German occupation that to keep Antwerp and Brussels she must take Portsmouth and London.  France is no less deeply engaged.  You can judge better than I what chance Germany now has, or can persuade herself she has, of exhausting or overwhelming her western enemies without ruining herself in the attempt.