The balance of power is a dangerous principle; a general friendship between all Great Powers, or, better still, a League of the Nations, is by far preferable.  But that consideration does not touch the actual point, which is that we did not seek to set up the principle of balancing that has given rise to so many questions.  It was forced on us and was a sheer necessity of the situation.  We did all we could to avoid it by negotiations with Germany, which, had they succeeded in the end, would have relieved France and Russia as much as ourselves and would have prevented the war.

Our efforts to preserve the peace ended in failure.  The cause of that failure was nothing that we failed to do or that France did.  It was proximately Austrian recklessness and indirectly, but just as strongly, German ambition.  A real desire in July, 1914, on the part of the Central Powers to avoid war would have averted it.  That Serbia may have been a provocative neighbor is no answer to the reproaches made to-day against the old Governments in Vienna and Berlin.  They failed to take the steps requisite if peace were to be preserved.

People ask why the British Government between 1906 and 1914 did not discuss in public a situation which it understood well, and appeal to the nation.  The answer is that to have done so would have been greatly to increase the difficulty of averting war.  Up to the middle of 1913 the indications were that it was far from unlikely that war might in the result be averted.  That was the view of some, both here and on the Continent, who were most competent to judge, men who had real opportunities for close observation from day to day.  It is a view which is not in material conflict with anything we have since learned.  The question whether war is inevitable has always been, as Bismarck more than once insisted, one for the statesmen of the countries concerned, and not for the soldiers and sailors who have a restricted field to work in, and for whom it is in consequence difficult to see things as a whole.  Nor does great importance attach to-day to the triumphant declarations of those who, having chanced to guess aright, take pride in the cheap title to wisdom which has become theirs after the event.  Still less does respect attach to the small but noisy minority in each of the countries concerned who in the years before 1914 were continuously contributing to bringing war on our heads by expressions of dislike to neighboring nations, and by prophecies that war with them must come.  In the main Germany was worse in this feature than ourselves.  But there were those here whose language made them useful propagandists for the German military party, to whom they were of much service.

Few wars are really inevitable.  If we knew better how we should be careful to comport ourselves it may be that none are so.  But extremists, whether chauvinist or pacifist, are not helpful in avoiding wars.  That is because human nature is what it is.