*How the Nation Took It.*

The moment he said that we could not "stand aside with our arms folded"
and see our friend and neighbour France "bombarded and battered," the
whole nation rose to applaud him. All the Foreign Office distrust of
public opinion, the concealment of the Anglo-French plan of campaign,
the disguise of the _Entente_ in a quaker's hat, the duping of the
British public and the Kaiser with one and the same prevarication, had
been totally unnecessary and unpopular, like most of these ingenuities
which diplomatists think subtle and Machiavellian. The British Public
had all along been behind Mr. Winston Churchill. It had wanted Sir
Edward to do just what Sazonoff wanted him to do, and what I, in the
columns of _The Daily News_ proposed he should do nine months ago (I
must really be allowed to claim that I am not merely wise after the
event), which was to arm to the teeth regardless of an expense which to
us would have been a mere fleabite, and tell Germany that if she, laid a
finger on France we would unite with France to defeat her, offering her
at the same time as consolation for that threat, the assurance that we
would do as much to France if she wantonly broke the peace in the like
fashion by attacking Germany. No unofficial Englishman worth his salt
wanted to snivel hypocritically about our love of peace and our respect
for treaties and our solemn acceptance of a painful duty, and all the
rest of the nauseous mixture of school-master's twaddle, parish magazine
cant, and cinematograph melodrama with which we were deluged. We were
perfectly ready to knock the Kaiser's head off just to teach him that if
he thought he was going to ride roughshod over Europe, including our new
friends the French, and the plucky little Belgians, he was reckoning
without old England. And in this pugnacious but perfectly