Germany to-day, even if the Germans had respected the neutrality of
Belgium. But the unprovoked assault upon a little people that asked only
to be let alone united all opinions in this country and brought us in
with a rush. I believe there is one German, at least (I hope he is
alive), who understands this. Early in July, 1914, a German student at
Oxford, who was a friend and pupil of mine, came to say good-bye to me.
I have since wondered whether he was under orders to join his regiment.
Anyhow, we talked very freely of many things, and he told me of an
adventure that had befallen him in an Oxford picture-palace. Portraits
of notabilities were being thrown on the screen. When a portrait of the
German Emperor appeared, a youth, sitting just behind my friend, shouted
out an insulting and scurrilous remark. So my friend stood up and turned
round and, catching him a cuff on the head, said,'That's my emperor'.
The house was full of undergraduates, and he expected to be seized and
thrown into the street. To his great surprise the undergraduates, many
of whom have now fallen on the fields of France, broke into rounds of
cheering. 'I should like to think', my friend said, 'that a thing like
that could possibly happen in a German city, but I am afraid that the
feeling there would always be against the foreigner. I admire the
English; they are so just.' I have heard nothing of him since, except a
rumour that he is with the German army of occupation in Belgium. If so,
I like to think of him at a regimental mess, suggesting doubts, or, if
that is an impossible breach of military discipline, keeping silence,
when the loud-voiced major explains that the sympathy of the English for
Belgium is all pretence and cant.

Ideal and disinterested motives are always to be reckoned with in human
nature. What the Germans call 'real politics', that is to say, politics
which treat disinterested motives as negligible, have led them into a
morass and have bogged them there. How easy it is to explain that the