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It is very difficult to write, more difficult to believe that what I write will succeed in reaching you.  My husband insists on my urging you—­it is not necessary I am sure—­to destroy the letter and all possible indications of its origin, should you think it worth translating.  The letter will go by a business friend of my husband’s to Holland, and be got off from there.  For our business with Holland is now exceedingly brisk as you may understand.  Her neutrality is most precious to us[84].

Well, I have of course a divided mind.  I think of those old days in Liverpool and Devonshire—­how far off they seem!  And yet I spent all last year in England.  It was in March last when I was with you and we talked of the amazing treatment of your army—­I cannot any longer call it our army—­by ministers crying for the resignation of its officers and eager to make their humiliation an election cry!  How far off that seems, too!  Let me tell you that it was the conduct of your ministers, Churchill especially, that made people here so confident that your Government could not fight.  It seemed impossible that Lloyd George and his following could have the effrontery to pose as a “war” cabinet; still more impossible that any sane people could trust them if they did!  Perhaps you may remember a talk we had also in March about Matthew Arnold whom I was reading again during my convalescence at Sidmouth.  You said that “Friendship’s Garland” and its Arminius could not be written now.  I disputed that and told you that it was still true that your Government talked and “gassed” just as much as ever, and were wilfully blind to the fact that your power of action was wholly unequal to your words.  As in 1870 so now.  Nay, worse, your rulers have always known it perfectly well, but refused to see it or to admit it, because they wanted office and knew that to say the truth would bring the radical vote in the cities upon their poor heads.  It is the old hypocrisy, in the sense in which Germans have always accused your nation:  alas! and it is half my nation too.  You pride yourselves on “Keeping your word” to Belgium.  But you pride yourselves also, not so overtly just now, on always refusing to prepare yourselves to keep that word in deed.  In the first days of August you knew, absolutely and beyond all doubt, that you could do nothing to make good your word.  You had not the moral courage to say so, and, having said so, to act accordingly and to warn Belgium that your promise was “a scrap of paper,” and effectively nothing more.  It is nothing more, and has proved to be nothing more, but you do not see that your indelible disgrace lies just in this, that you unctuously proclaim that you are keeping your word when all the time you know, you have always known, that you refused utterly and completely to take the needful steps to enable you to translate word into action.  Have you not torn up your “scrap