interest of the British nation, and which made of our foreign policy the most disturbing element in Europe, as these despatches testify.
These efforts met with general support from British Liberals and from Liberal newspapers. But the repeated denials of Mr. Asquith and Sir E. Grey in the House of Commons that any such secret commitments existed, combined with a lessening of acuteness in the naval controversy with Germany, the Haldane Mission to Berlin, the proof of hearty Anglo-German co-operation throughout the series of crises raised by the Balkan wars, and the well-founded belief that an arrangement was being negotiated with Germany over colonial matters, lulled the country into a sense of false security.
The opening of the fatal year found surface relations between Britain and Germany better than at any moment since the outbreak of the first Morocco crisis ten years before. When the crash came in August, British Liberals were suddenly confronted with the fact that they had been living in a fools' paradise, and that, the declarations of their trusted leaders as to the freedom of the country from diplomatic, military and naval entanglements had been untrue in substance, if not in form. But after one gasp of horrified amazement and indignant protest they condoned the betrayal of the people, and sought consolation in a self-deception which attributed altruistic motives to a war that, but for the train of circumstances set up by those secret and unavowed commitments, would probably never have taken place.[1] For I contend that no man who studies the events of the ten years preceding the war in the light of all that is now disclosed, and with the sole desire of arriving at the truth [whatever his views may be as to the responsibility of the Teutonic Powers in the last three, weeks of the crisis], can believe that the Tsar and his Ministers would have pursued with such conscious and sustained deliberation their preparations for a Balkan explosion, or could have counted so entirely upon the "revanche" elements in France, fortified by an eight years' intimate collaboration with the British military and naval staffs, unless they had felt assured that the British Foreign Office was too deeply committed to draw back when Tsardom decided the opportune moment had come to force the issue.
- ↑ This is also Lord Loreburn's published opinion.
