addition: "England, of course, will remain neutral if war is forced upon
Germany? That follows, I presume?" "No!" from the British Foreign Office.
Reason as before. And the negotiations fall through. How should they not
under the conditions? There could be no understanding, because there was
no confidence. There could be no confidence because there was mutual fear.
There was mutual fear because the Triple Alliance stood in arms against
the Triple Entente. What was wrong? Germany? England? No. The European
tradition and system.

The fact, then, that those negotiations broke down is no more evidence
of sinister intentions on the part of Germany than it is on the part of
Great Britain. Baron Beyens, to my mind the most competent and the most
impartial, as well as one of the best-informed, of those who have written
on the events leading up to the war, says explicitly of the policy of the
German Chancellor:--

A practicable _rapprochement_ between his country and Great Britain
was the dream with which M. de Bethmann-Hollweg most willingly soothed
himself, without the treacherous _arrière-pensèe_ which the Prince von
Bülow perhaps would have had of finishing later on, at an opportune
moment, with the British Navy. Nothing authorizes us to believe that
there was not a basis of sincerity in the language of M. de Jagow when he
expressed to Sir E. Goschen in the course of their last painful interview
his poignant regret at the crumbling of his entire policy and that of the
Chancellor, which had been to make friends with Great Britain, and then
through Great Britain to get closer to France.[1]

Meantime the considerations I have here laid before the reader, in relation
to this general question of Anglo-German rivalry, are, I submit, all
relevant, and must be taken into fair consideration in forming a judgment.