who knows England, any man who hates England as one hates a living
thing, will tell you it is not true. The English may be snobs, they may
be plutocrats, they may be hypocrites, but they are not, as a fact,
plotters; and I gravely doubt whether they could be if they wanted to.
The mass of the people are perfectly incapable of plotting at all, and
if the small ring of rich people who finance our politics were plotting
for anything, it was for peace at almost any price. Any Londoner who
knows the London streets and newspapers as he knows the Nelson column or
the Inner Circle, knows that there were men in the governing class and
in the Cabinet who were literally thirsting to defend Germany until
Germany, by her own act, became indefensible. If they said nothing in
support of the tearing up of the promise of peace to Belgium, it is
simply because there was nothing to be said.

You were the first people to talk about World-Politics; and the first
people to disregard them altogether. Even your foreign policy is
domestic policy. It does not even apply to any people who are not
Germans; and of your wild guesses about some twenty other peoples, not
one has gone right even by accident. Your two or three shots at my own
not immaculate land have been such that you would have been much nearer
the truth if you had tried to invade England by crossing the Caucasus,
or to discover England among the South Sea Islands. With your first
delusion, that our courage was calculated and malignant when in truth
our very corruption was timid and confused, I have already dealt. The
case is the same with your second favourite phrase; that the British
army is mercenary. You learnt it in books and not in battlefields; and I
should like to be present at a scene in which you tried to bribe the
most miserable little loafer in Hammersmith as if he were a cynical
condottiere selling his spear to some foreign city. It is not the fact,
my dear sir. You have been misinformed. The British Army is not at this