INTRODUCTION.

THE FACTS OF THE CASE.

Unless we are all mad, there is at the back of the most bewildering
business a story: and if we are all mad, there is no such thing as
madness. If I set a house on fire, it is quite true that I may illuminate
many other people's weaknesses as well as my own. It may be that the master
of the house was burned because he was drunk: it may be that the mistress
of the house was burned because she was stingy, and perished arguing about
the expense of a fire-escape. It is, nevertheless, broadly true that they
both were burned because I set fire to their house. That is the story
of the thing. The mere facts of the story about the present European
conflagration are quite as easy to tell.

Before we go on to the deeper things which make this war the most sincere
war of human history, it is as easy to answer the question of why England
came to be in it at all, as it is to ask how a man fell down a coal-hole,
or failed to keep an appointment. Facts are not the whole truth. But
facts are facts, and in this case the facts are few and simple. Prussia,
France, and England had all promised not to invade Belgium. Prussia
proposed to invade Belgium, because it was the safest way of invading
France. But Prussia promised that if she might break in, through her own
broken promise and ours, she would break in and not steal. In other words,
we were offered at the same instant a promise of faith in the future and
a proposal of perjury in the present. Those interested in human origins
may refer to an old Victorian writer of English, who, in the last and most
restrained of his historical essays, wrote of Frederick the Great, the
founder of this unchanging Prussian policy. After describing how Frederick
broke the guarantee he had signed on behalf of Maria Theresa, he then