I replied (continues Sir Edward Grey) that I did not wish to say that, or to use anything that was like a threat, or attempt to apply pressure by saying that, if things became worse, we should intervene. There would be no question of our intervening if Germany was not involved, or even if France was not involved. But we knew very well that if the issue did become such that we thought British interests required us to intervene, we must intervene at once, and the decision would have to be very rapid, just as the decisions of other Powers had to be. I hoped that the friendly tone of our conversations would continue as at present, and that I should be able to keep as closely in touch with the German Government when working for peace. But if we failed in our efforts to keep the peace, and if the issue spread so that it involved practically every European interest, I do not wish to be open to any reproach from him that the friendly tone of all our conversations had misled him or his Government into supposing that we should not take action, and to the reproach that if they had not been so misled, the course of things might have been different. The German Ambassador took no exception to what I had said; indeed, he told me that it accorded with what he had already given in Berlin as his view of the situation. Not so much this plain statement of the British case as the impressive way in which it was delivered startled the Kaiser’s representative and flashed a blinding light on the dark ways of German diplomacy. That same evening the Prince made known the personal effect upon himself of what he had seen and heard, and it was that Great Britain’s neutrality “could not be relied upon.” This “subjective impression,” as they termed it, was telegraphed to Vienna, where it was anxiously discussed. And, curiously enough, it sufficed to shatter the hopes which Austrian statesmen had cherished that nothing was to be feared from Great Britain. Psychologically, this tragic way of taking the news is difficult to explain. Whether it was that the Austrians, having less faith in the solidarity of their Empire and the staying powers of their mixed population, and greater misgivings about the issue of the war, were naturally more pessimistic and more apt to magnify than to underrate the dangers with which a European conflict threatened them, or that they had received unwelcome tidings of a like nature from an independent source, I am unable to determine. I know, however, that Prince Lichnowsky’s own mind was made up during that colloquy with Sir Edward Grey. And he made no mystery of it. To a statesman who brought up the topic in the course of an ordinary conversation he remarked: