There was a moment’s pause and then the Foreign Secretary spoke again: 

“Yet we must remember that there are two Germanys.  There is the Germany of men like ourselves—­of men like Lichnowsky and Jagow.  Then there is the Germany of men of the war party.  The war party has got the upper hand.”

At this point Sir Edward’s eyes filled with tears.

“Thus the efforts of a lifetime go for nothing.  I feel like a man who has wasted his life.”

“This scene was most affecting,” Page said afterward.  “Sir Edward not only realized what the whole thing meant, but he showed that he realized the awful responsibility for it.”

Sir Edward then asked the Ambassador to explain the situation to President Wilson; he expressed the hope that the United States would take an attitude of neutrality and that Great Britain might look for “the courtesies of neutrality” from this country.  Page tried to tell him of the sincere pain that such a war would cause the President and the American people.

“I came away,” the Ambassador afterward said, “with a sort of stunned sense of the impending ruin of half the world[64].”

The significant fact in this interview is that the British Foreign Secretary justified the attitude of his country exclusively on the ground of the violation of a treaty.  This is something that is not yet completely understood in the United States.  The participation of Great Britain in this great continental struggle is usually regarded as having been inevitable, irrespective of the German invasion of Belgium; yet the fact is that, had Germany not invaded Belgium, Great Britain would not have declared war, at least at this critical time.  Sir Edward came to Page after a week’s experience with a wavering cabinet.  Upon the general question of Britain’s participation in a European war the Asquith Ministry had been by no means unanimous.  Probably Mr. Asquith himself and Mr. Lloyd George would have voted against taking such a step.  It is quite unlikely that the cabinet could have carried a majority of the House of Commons on this issue.  But the violation of the Belgian treaty changed the situation in a twinkling.  The House of Commons at once took its stand in favour of intervention.  All members of the cabinet, excepting John Morley and John Burns, who resigned, immediately aligned themselves on the side of war.  In the minds of British statesmen the violation of this treaty gave Britain no choice.  Germany thus forced Great Britain into the war, just as, two and a half years afterward, the Prussian war lords compelled the United States to take up arms.  Sir Edward Grey’s interview with the American Ambassador thus had great historic importance, for it makes this point clear.  The two men had recently had many discussions on another subject in which the violation of a treaty was the great consideration—­that of Panama tolls—­and there was a certain appropriateness in this explanation of the British Foreign Secretary that precisely the same point had determined Great Britain’s participation in the greatest struggle that has ever devastated Europe.