as long as a man says what we have agreed to accept as the right thing
it does not matter in the least what he actually does. In fact, we do
not clearly see why a man need introduce the subject of morals at all,
unless there is something questionable to be whitewashed. The
unprejudiced foreigner calls this hypocrisy: that is why we call him
prejudiced. But I, who have been a poor man in a poor country,
understand the foreigner better.

Now from the general to the particular. In describing the course of the
diplomatic negotiations by which our Foreign Office achieved its design
of at last settling accounts with Germany at the most favourable moment
from the Militarist point of view, I shall have to exhibit our Secretary
of State for Foreign Affairs as behaving almost exactly as we have
accused the Kaiser of behaving. Yet I see him throughout as an honest
gentleman, "perplexed in the extreme," meaning well, revolted at the
last moment by the horror of war, clinging to the hope that in some
vague way he could persuade everybody to be reasonable if they would
only come and talk to him as they did when the big Powers were kept out
of the Balkan war, but hopelessly destitute of a positive policy of any
kind, and therefore unable to resist those who had positive business in
hand. And do not for a moment imagine that I think that the conscious
Sir Edward Grey was Othello, and the subconscious, Iago. I do think that
the Foreign Office, of which Sir Edward is merely the figure head, was
as deliberately and consciously bent on a long deferred Militarist war
with Germany as the Admiralty was; and that is saying a good deal. If
Sir Edward Grey did not know what he wanted, Mr. Winston Churchill was
in no such perplexity. He was not an "ist" of any sort, but a
straightforward holder of the popular opinion that if you are threatened
you should hit out, unless you are afraid to. Had he had the conduct of
the affair he might quite possibly have averted the war (and thereby