fight her, Russia or no Russia (a far less irritating and provocative
attitude), although we knew full well that an attack on France through
Belgium would be part of the German program if the Russian peril became
acute. They would point out that if our own Secretary for Foreign
Affairs openly disclaimed any knowledge of the terms of the
Franco-Russian alliance, it was hard for a German to believe that they
were wholly fit for publication. In short, they would say "If you were
so jolly wise and well intentioned before the event, why did not your
Foreign Minister and your ambassadors in Berlin and Vienna and St.
Petersburg--we beg pardon, Petrograd--invite us to keep the peace and
rely on western public opinion instead of refusing us every pledge
except the hostile one to co-operate with France against us in the North
Sea, and making it only too plain to us that your policy was a Junker
policy as much as ours, and that we had nothing to hope from your
goodwill? What evidence had we that you were playing any other game than
this Militarist chess of our own, which you now so piously renounce, but
which none of you except a handful of Socialists whom you despise and
Syndicalists whom you imprison on Militarist pretexts has opposed for
years past, though it has been all over your Militarist anti-German
platforms and papers and magazines? Are your Social-Democratic
principles sincere, or are they only a dagger you keep up your sleeve to
stab us in the back when our two most formidable foes are trying to
garotte us? If so, where does your moral superiority come in, hypocrites
that you are? If not, why, we repeat, did you not make them known to all
the world, instead of making an ambush for us by your senseless
silence?"

I see no reply to that except a frank confession that we did not know
our own minds; that we came to a knowledge of them only when Germany's
attack on France forced us to make them up at last; that though