accords mainly with the atmospheric depressions advancing, or receding, across the Channel. Today, as Sir Edward Grey said recently, our expenditure must be dependent upon the expenditure of other powers. It is thus necessary to conclude that our avoidance of Europe is more and more impossible, that we are indissolubly associated, and that we cannot put the continent by. For it is largely in that precipitous watershed that the torrent of our national expenditure has origin; the chief lions in our path can be traced to that lair.
This consideration pushes us a stage into the subject. In the twentieth century, to wash our hands of Europe is to decline to have anything to do with our most crucial interests and our most vital necessities.
If, then, the policy indicated by Sir Robert Peel is becoming, on the whole, unacceptable; so, also, on the other hand, is the policy of active moral action so finely enforced by Mr. Gladstone. The ground of this view can be stated in a single sentence. Now that constitutional government obtains everywhere, the good things of freedom are presumably already within the reach of all. But, more than this, we have not the power. For instance, all Englishmen probably disapprove of Germany's treatment of the Poles in East Prussia. Here freedom might well summon us to interfere. No need to waste words in proving laboriously that the day is gone by for any such sentimental journey into the fatherland.
