Such an outline was the altruistic scope of the unsigned agreement entered into by the three parties of the Triple Entente; and it only remained to get ready for the day when the matter could be brought to issue.  The murder of the Archduke Ferdinand furnished Russia with the occasion, since she felt that her armies were ready, the sword sharpened, and the Entente sure and binding.

The mobilization by Russia was all that France needed “to do that which might be required of her by her interests.” (Reply of the French Government to the German Ambassador at Paris, August 1st, 1914.)

Had the neutrality of Belgium been respected as completely as the neutrality of Holland, England would have joined her “friends” in the assault on Germany, as Sir Edward Grey was forced to admit when the German Ambassador in vain pressed him to state his own terms as the price of English neutrality.

The hour had struck.  Russia was sure of herself, and the rest followed automatically since all had been provided for long before.  The French fleet was in the Mediterranean, as the result of the military compact between France and England signed, sealed and delivered in November, 1912, and withheld from the cognizance of the British Parliament until after war had been declared.  The British fleet had been mobilized early in July in anticipation of Russia’s mobilization on land—­and here again it is Sir Edward Grey who incidentally supplies the proof.

In his anxiety, while there was still the fear that Russia might hold her hand, he telegraphed to the British Ambassador in St. Petersburg on 27th of July, requiring him to assure the Russian Foreign Minister, that the British Fleet, “which is concentrated, as it happens” would not disperse from Portland.

That “as it happens” is quite the most illuminating slip in the British White Paper, and is best comprehended by those who know what have been the secret orders of the British fleet since 1909, and what was the end in view when King George reviewed it earlier in the month, and when His Majesty so hurriedly summoned the unconstitutional “Home Rule” conference at Buckingham Palace on 18th of July.  Nothing remained for the “friends” but to so manoeuvre that Germany should be driven to declare war, or see her frontiers crossed.  If she did the first, she became the “aggressor”; if she waited to be attacked she incurred the peril of destruction.

Such, in outline, are the causes and steps that led to the outbreak of war.  The writer has seen those steps well and carefully laid, tested and tried beforehand.  Every rung of the scaling ladder being raised for the storming of the German defences on land and sea was planed and polished in the British Foreign Office.

As Sir Edward Grey confessed three years ago, he was “but the fly on the wheel.”  That wheel was the ever faster driven purpose of Great Britain to destroy the growing sea-power and commerce of Germany.  The strain had reached the breaking point.