neutrality. Whether it might have been so can never be determined. But
it is certain that no such struggle would have enlisted the united
sympathies and whole-hearted devotion of the British realms, still
less those of the United States, and in it we might well have been
defeated. From that division and possible defeat we and the world were
saved by Germany's decision that military advantage outweighed moral
considerations. The invasion of Belgium and Luxemburg united the
British Empire on the question of intervention. Three ministers alone
out of more than forty--Lord Morley, Mr. John Burns, and Mr. C. P.
Trevelyan--dissented from the Cabinet's decision, and the minority in
the nation was of still more slender proportions. Parliament supported
the Ministry without a division when on 4 August England declared war.

Had we counted the cost? the German Chancellor asked our ambassador in
Berlin on the eve of the declaration. The cost would not have affected
our decision, but it was certainly not anticipated, and the Entente
was ill-prepared to cope with the strength displayed by Germany. The
British Navy was, indeed, as ready as the German Army, and the command
of the sea passed automatically into our hands when the German Fleet
withdrew from the North Sea on 26 July. But for that circumstance not
a single division could have been sent across the sea, and the war
would have been over in a few months. Nor was the British Army
unprepared for the task that had been allotted to it in anticipation.
It was the judgment not only of our own but of Allied Staffs that an
expeditionary force of six divisions would suffice to balance German
superiority in the West; and that force, consisting of better material
better trained than any other army in the field, was in its place in
the line of battle hundreds of miles from its base within three weeks
of the declaration of war. The real miscalculation was of the
respective strength of France and Germany, and no one had foreseen