paper," and a very good thing too; for General von Bernhardi's
assumption that circumstances alter treaties is not a page from
Machiavelli: it is a platitude from the law books. The man in the street
understood little or nothing about Servia or Russia or any of the cards
with which the diplomatists were playing their perpetual game of Beggar
my Neighbour. We were rasped beyond endurance by Prussian Militarism and
its contempt for us and for human happiness and common sense; and we
just rose at it and went for it. We have set out to smash the Kaiser
exactly as we set out to smash the Mahdi. Mr. Wells never mentioned a
treaty. He said, in effect: "There stands the monster all freedom-loving
men hate; and at last we are going to fight it." And the public, bored
by the diplomatists, said: "Now you're talking!" We did not stop to ask
our consciences whether the Prussian assumption that the dominion of the
civilized earth belongs to German culture is really any more bumptious
than the English assumption that the dominion of the sea belongs to
British commerce. And in our island security we were as little able as
ever to realize the terrible military danger of Germany's geographical
position between France and England on her west flank and Russia on her
east: all three leagued for her destruction; and how unreasonable it was
to ask Germany to lose the fraction of a second (much less Sir Maurice
de Runsen's naïve "a few days' delay") in dashing at her Western foe
when she could obtain no pledge as to Western intentions. "We are now in
a state of necessity; and Necessity knows no law," said the Imperial
Chancellor in the Reichstag. "It is a matter of life and death to us,"
said the German Minister for Foreign Affairs to our Ambassador in
Berlin, who had suddenly developed an extraordinary sense of the
sacredness of the Treaty of London, dated 1839, and still, as it
happened, inviolate among the torn fragments of many subsequent and
similar "scraps of paper." Our Ambassador seems to have been of Sir
Maurice's opinion that there could be no such tearing hurry. The Germans