The facts of the case.
Unless we are all mad, there is at the back of the
most bewildering business a story: and if we
are all mad, there is no such thing as madness.
If I set a house on fire, it is quite true that I may
illuminate many other people’s weaknesses as
well as my own. It may be that the master of
the house was burned because he was drunk: it
may be that the mistress of the house was burned because
she was stingy, and perished arguing about the expense
of a fire-escape. It is, nevertheless, broadly
true that they both were burned because I set fire
to their house. That is the story of the thing.
The mere facts of the story about the present European
conflagration are quite as easy to tell.
Before we go on to the deeper things which make this
war the most sincere war of human history, it is as
easy to answer the question of why England came to
be in it at all, as it is to ask how a man fell down
a coal-hole, or failed to keep an appointment.
Facts are not the whole truth. But facts are
facts, and in this case the facts are few and simple.
Prussia, France, and England had all promised not
to invade Belgium. Prussia proposed to invade
Belgium, because it was the safest way of invading
France. But Prussia promised that if she might
break in, through her own broken promise and ours,
she would break in and not steal. In other words,
we were offered at the same instant a promise of faith
in the future and a proposal of perjury in the present.
Those interested in human origins may refer to an
old Victorian writer of English, who, in the last and
most restrained of his historical essays, wrote of
Frederick the Great, the founder of this unchanging
Prussian policy. After describing how Frederick
broke the guarantee he had signed on behalf of Maria
Theresa, he then describes how Frederick sought to
put things straight by a promise that was an insult.
“If she would but let him have Silesia, he would,
he said, stand by her against any power which should
try to deprive her of her other dominions, as if he
was not already bound to stand by her, or as if his
new promise could be of more value than the old one.”
That passage was written by Macaulay, but so far as
the mere contemporary facts are concerned it might
have been written by me.
Upon the immediate logical and legal origin of the
English interest there can be no rational debate.
There are some things so simple that one can almost
prove them with plans and diagrams, as in Euclid.
One could make a kind of comic calendar of what would
have happened to the English diplomatist, if he had
been silenced every time by Prussian diplomacy.
Suppose we arrange it in the form of a kind of diary:
July 24: Germany invades Belgium.
July 25: England declares war.
July 26: Germany promises not to annex Belgium.
