Bachelor’s Farm, Ockham, Surrey. 
     Sunday, August 2, 1914.

The Grand Smash is come.  Last night the German Ambassador at St. Petersburg handed the Russian Government a declaration of war.  To-day the German Government asked the United States to take its diplomatic and consular business in Russia in hand.  Herrick, our Ambassador in Paris, has already taken the German interests there.

It is reported in London to-day that the Germans have invaded Luxemburg and France.

Troops were marching through London at one o’clock this morning.  Colonel Squier[61] came out to luncheon.  He sees no way for England to keep out of it.  There is no way.  If she keep out, Germany will take Belgium and Holland, France would be betrayed, and England would be accused of forsaking her friends.

People came to the Embassy all day to-day (Sunday), to learn how they can get to the United States—­a rather hard question to answer.  I thought several times of going in, but Greene and Squier said there was no need of it.  People merely hoped we might tell them what we can’t tell them.

Returned travellers from Paris report indescribable confusion—­people unable to obtain beds and fighting for seats in railway carriages.

It’s been a hard day here.  I have a lot (not a big lot either) of routine work on my desk which I meant to do.  But it has been impossible to get my mind off this Great Smash.  It holds one in spite of one’s self.  I revolve it and revolve it—­of course getting nowhere.

It will revive our shipping.  In a jiffy, under stress of a general European war, the United States Senate passed a bill permitting American registry to ships built abroad.  Thus a real emergency knocked the old Protectionists out, who had held on for fifty years!  Correspondingly the political parties here have agreed to suspend their Home Rule quarrel till this war is ended.  Artificial structures fall when a real wind blows.

The United States is the only great Power wholly out of it.  The United States, most likely, therefore, will be able to play a helpful and historic part at its end.  It will give President Wilson, no doubt, a great opportunity.  It will probably help us politically and it will surely help us economically.

The possible consequences stagger the imagination.  Germany has staked everything on her ability to win primacy.  England and France (to say nothing of Russia) really ought to give her a drubbing.  If they do not, this side of the world will henceforth be German.  If they do flog Germany, Germany will for a long time be in discredit.

I walked out in the night a while ago.  The stars are bright, the night is silent, the country quiet—­as quiet as peace itself.  Millions of men are in camp and on warships.  Will they all have to fight and many of them die—­to untangle this network of treaties and affiances and to blow off huge debts with gunpowder so that the world may start again?