bridges of battleships or walking along in city or country, upon this huge possibility the crime of Sarajevo had just opened, and of the state of the world in relation to such possibilities.  Few women, one guesses, heeded what was happening, and of the men, the men whose decision to launch that implacable threat turned the destinies of the world to war, there is no reason to believe that a single one of them had anything approaching the imaginative power needed to understand fully what it was they were doing.  We have looked for an hour or so into the seething pot of Mr. Britling’s brain and marked its multiple strands, its inconsistencies, its irrational transitions.  It was but a specimen.  Nearly every brain of the select few that counted in this cardinal determination of the world’s destinies, had its streak of personal motive, its absurd and petty impulses and deflections.  One man decided to say this because if he said that he would contradict something he had said and printed four or five days ago; another took a certain line because so he saw his best opportunity of putting a rival into a perplexity.  It would be strange if one could reach out now and recover the states of mind of two such beings as the German Kaiser and his eldest son as Europe stumbled towards her fate through the long days and warm, close nights of that July.  Here was the occasion for which so much of their lives had been but the large pretentious preparation, coming right into their hands to use or forgo, here was the opportunity that would put them into the very forefront of history forever; this journalist emperor with the paralysed arm, this common-fibred, sly, lascivious son.  It is impossible that they did not dream of glory over all the world, of triumphant processions, of a world-throne that would outshine Caesar’s, of a godlike elevation, of acting Divus Caesar while yet alive.  And being what they were they must have imagined spectators, and the young man, who was after all a young man of particularly poor quality, imagined no doubt certain women onlookers, certain humiliated and astonished friends, and thought of the clothes he would wear and the gestures he would make.  The nickname his English cousins had given this heir to all the glories was the “White Rabbit.”  He was the backbone of the war party at court.  And presently he stole bric-a-brac.  That will help posterity to the proper values of things in 1914.  And the Teutonic generals and admirals and strategists with their patient and perfect plans, who were so confident of victory, each within a busy skull must have enacted anticipatory dreams of his personal success and marshalled his willing and unwilling admirers.  Readers of histories and memoirs as most of this class of men are, they must have composed little eulogistic descriptions of the part themselves were to play in the opening drama, imagined pleasing vindications and interesting documents.  Some of them perhaps saw difficulties, but few foresaw failure.  For all this set of brains the thing came as a choice to take or reject; they could make war or prevent it.  And they chose war.