Do we quite realise that if foreign policy had that continuity which the political pundits pretend, we should now be fighting on the side of the Turk against the Balkan States?  That we have entered into solemn treaty obligations, as part of our national policy, to guarantee for ever the “integrity and independence of the Turkish dominions in Europe,” that we fought a great and popular war to prevent that triumph of the Christian population which will arise as the result of the present war?  That but for this policy which caused us to maintain the Turk in Europe the present war would certainly not be raging, and, what is much more to the point, that but for our policy the abominations which have provoked it and which it is its object to terminate, would so far as human reason can judge at all have been brought to an end generations since?  Do we quite realise that we are in large part responsible, not merely for the war, but for the long agony of horror which have provoked it and made it necessary; that when we talk of the jealousies and rivalries of the Powers as playing so large a part in the responsibility for these things, we represent, perhaps, the chief among those jealousies and rivalries?  That it is not mainly the Turk nor the Russian nor the Austrian which has determined the course of history in the Balkan peninsular since the middle of the 19th century, but we Englishmen—­the country gentleman obsessed by vague theories of the Balance of Power and heaven knows what, reading his Times and barking out his preposterous politics over the dinner table?  That this fatal policy was dictated simply by fear of the growth of “Russian barbarism and autocracy” and “the overshadowing of the Western nations by a country whose institutions are inimical to our own”?  That while we were thus led into war by a phantom danger to our Indian possessions, we were quite blind to the real danger which threatened them, which a year or two later, in the Mutiny, nearly lost us them and which were not due to the machinations of a rival power but to our own misgovernment; that this very “barbaric growth” and expansion towards India which we fought a war to check we are now actively promoting in Persia and elsewhere by our (effective) alliance?  That while as recently as fifteen years ago we would have gone to war to prevent any move of Russia towards the Indian frontier, we are to-day actually encouraging her to build a railway there?  And that it is now another nation which stands as the natural barrier to Russian expansion to the West—­Germany—­whose power we are challenging, and that all tendencies point to our backing again the wrong horse, to our fighting with the “semi-Asiatic barbarian” (as our fathers used to call him) against the nation which has close racial and cultural affinity to our own, just as half a century since the same fatal obsession about the “Balance of Power” led us to fight with the Mohammedan in order to bolster up for half a century his anti-Christian rule.