a good German," yet he looked to the Triple Alliance with a distinctly friendly eye. In earlier days he had eulogised the Austrian "sentinel" of the Balkans; he had hailed the Austro-German alliance as glad tidings of great joy; and, as late as November 1899, he could declare that Germany was the State "with which we have for many years entertained relations of sympathy and friendship beyond all others."
Yet this policy, too, was closed to us by a very cogent reason. To side with the Triple Alliance definitely would be to give overwhelming preponderance to that association of the powers. But since immemorial days, since the days even of the mediæval Papacy, the policy of England had been to set her face against any would-be master of Christendom. She had ever, on occasion, struck the proudest lilies with her rod. Whoso throughout the ages had stretched his hand against the ark of European freedom, she had thwarted him in the bold design.
Therefore our policy, during the generation after 1870, was to adopt isolation, since there seemed room for nothing else.
Yet somehow the current of human affairs, or the tide of necessity, or that situation in life which is the dictator of duty, began insensibly to shift us from our solitary moorings. For though, in the forefront of European affairs, the mutual antagonism of the Triple and the Dual Alliances appeared to promise us security, in the background there was
