Nobody can read without a grim smile this misleading exposé which ignores the Austrian ultimatum to Servia, with its forty-eight hours’ term for an answer; the exasperating demands which were drafted, not for the purpose of being accepted by the Belgrade Government, but with the admitted object of provoking a refusal; the fervent insistence with which the British Foreign Minister besought the German Government to obtain an extension of the time from their Austrian ally; the mockery of a pretence at mediation made by the Kaiser and his Chancellor, and their refusal to fall in with Sir Edward Grey’s proposal to summon a conference and secure full satisfaction and effectual guarantees for Austria; and the German ultimatum, presented to Russia and to France at the very moment when the Vienna Government had “finally yielded” to Russia’s demands and “had good hopes of a peaceful issue.”[2] Those were essential factors in the origins of the war. Yet of these data the spiritual shepherds of the German people have nothing to say. They pass them over in silence. For they are labouring to establish in the minds of Evangelical Christians abroad their “inner right” to invoke the assistance of God for the Kaiser, who patronizes Him. This unctuous blending of Teutonic religion with the apology of systematic inhumanity reminds one of an attempt to improve the abominable smell of assafœtida with a sprinkling of eau-de-Cologne. These comments are nowise intended as a reproach to the theologians and pastors who have set their names to this appeal. Personally, I venture to think that they have acted most conscientiously in the matter, just as did von Treitschke, Bernhardi, and their colleagues and their followers. The only point that I would like to make clear is that they have a warped ethical sense--what the schoolmen were wont to term “a false conscience.” And the greater the scrupulosity with which they act in accordance with its promptings, the more cheerfully and abominably do they sin against the conscience of the human race. The simplicity and unction with which these men come forward to vindicate their “inner right” to pray God to help their Kaiser to victory over pacific peoples, the calm matter-of-fact way in which they accuse the Belgians of revolting barbarities--for that is one of their main contentions--and justify the Kaiser’s lordly contempt of the scrap of paper, are of a piece with every manifestation of the political cult which has become one of Germany’s holiest possessions. And it is because the British nation as a whole obstinately refused to listen to those who apprised them of this elemental movement, and of the dangers it concealed, that they dispensed with a large land army, slackened the work of shipbuilding, and trusted to a treaty which they are now surprised to see dealt with as a mere scrap of paper.