Russian alliance, fix the numbers of the army, and settle the
participation of the Powers in its organisation and training.



POLAND REVISITED--1915


I.


I have never believed in political assassination as a means to an end,
and least of all in assassination of the dynastic order. I don't know
how far murder can ever approach the perfection of a fine art, but looked
upon with the cold eye of reason it seems but a crude expedient of
impatient hope or hurried despair. There are few men whose premature
death could influence human affairs more than on the surface. The deeper
stream of causes depends not on individuals who, like the mass of
mankind, are carried on by a destiny which no murder has ever been able
to placate, divert, or arrest.

In July of last year I was a stranger in a strange city in the Midlands
and particularly out of touch with the world's politics. Never a very
diligent reader of newspapers, there were at that time reasons of a
private order which caused me to be even less informed than usual on
public affairs as presented from day to day in that necessarily
atmosphereless, perspectiveless manner of the daily papers, which
somehow, for a man possessed of some historic sense, robs them of all
real interest. I don't think I had looked at a daily for a month past.