I hold, as I daresay you do, that we are at a crisis of our history where there is not much room for talk.  The time when this struggle might have been averted or won by talk is long past.  During the hundred years before the war we have not talked much, or listened much, to the Germans.  For fifty of those years at least the head of waters that has now been let loose in a devastating flood over Europe was steadily accumulating; but we paid little attention to it.  People sometimes speak of the negotiations of the twelve days before the war as if the whole secret and cause of the war could be found there; but it is not so.  Statesmen, it is true, are the keepers of the lock-gates, but those keepers can only delay, they cannot prevent an inundation that has great natural causes.  The world has in it evil enough, and darkness enough.  But it is not so bad and so dark that a slip in diplomacy, a careless word, or an impolite gesture, can instantaneously, as if by magic, involve twenty million men in a struggle to the death.  It is only clever, conceited men, proud of their neat little minds, who think that because they cannot fathom the causes of the war, it might easily have been prevented.  I confess I find it difficult to conceive of the war in terms of simple right and wrong.  We must respect the tides, and their huge unintelligible force teaches us to respect them.

It is not a war of race.  For all our differences with the Germans, any cool and impartial mind must admit that we have many points of kinship with them.  During the years before the war our naval officers in the Mediterranean found, I believe, that it was easier to associate on terms of social friendship with the Austrians than with the officers of any other foreign navy.  We have a passionate admiration for France, and a real devotion to her, but that is a love affair, not a family tie.  We begin to be experienced in love affairs, for Ireland steadily refuses to be treated on any other footing.  In any case, we are much closer to the Germans than they are to the Bulgarians or the Turks.  Of these three we like the Turks the best, because they are chivalrous and generous enemies, which the Germans are not.

It is a war of ideas.  We are fighting an armed doctrine.  Yet Burke’s use of those words to describe the military power of Revolutionary France should warn us against fallacious attempts to simplify the issue.  When ideas become motives and are filtered into practice, they lose their clearness of outline and are often hard to recognize.  They leaven the lump, but the lump is still human clay, with its passions and prejudices, its pride and its hate.  I remember seeing in a provincial paper, in the early days of the war, two adjacent columns, both dealing with the war.  The first was headed ‘A Holy War’ and set forth the great principles of nationality, respect for treaties, and protection of the weak, which in our opinion are the main motives of the Allies in this war.  The second was headed ’The War on Commerce; Tips to capture German trade’, and set forth those other principles and motives which, in the opinion of the Germans, brought England into this war.