And so unhesitatingly was this view adopted in Berlin that when on July 29th the German Ambassador terminated one of his despatches with the expression of his personal impression--founded, he confessed, on nothing more tangible than the manner, intonation, looks of Sir Edward Grey--that if France were dragged into war Great Britain would not remain neutral, his timid warning failed to modify the accepted dogma that England was resolved to stand by inactive and look on at the shock of mighty armies on the Continent, satisfied to play the part of mediator as soon as victory and defeat should have cleared the way for the readjustment of the map of Europe. This amazing misjudgment can be explained without difficulty. Paradoxical though it may sound, the German Government suffered from a plethora of information. It was too well informed of what was going on in Russia, France, and Britain, and too little qualified to contemplate in correct perspective the things revealed. Take, for example, Russia. Every one of the influences to which the Tsar was supposed to be accessible, every one of the alleged weak points of the General Staff, the War Ministry, the Railway administration, the Finances, were all entered in the records and weighed among the motives for action. To the Austrian Foreign Office they were communicated by the German Ambassador, von Tschirschky, with whose own preconceived opinions of Russia’s inertness they dovetailed to perfection. All these data were at the fingers’ ends of the responsible leaders of the respective Governments, all the inferences drawn were set down as highly probable, and the final conclusion to which they pointed was that Russia would not fight under present circumstances, even if from a military point of view she could take the field, and that in any case she was sufficiently aware of her impotence to recognize her inability and bend before she was broken. It is easy, in the light of recent events, to laugh at these deductions and to deride the _naïveté_ of German omniscience. But on analysing the materials which Berlin statesmen had for a judgment, one discerns the reasons which led them to believe that a good prima facie case had been made out for its accuracy. One characteristic and clinching argument was advanced with an air of triumphant finality. These data, it was urged, are not theoretic assumptions formed in Germany. They are the deliberate views of competent Russians, arrived at in the conscientious discharge of their duty and uttered for the welfare of their own country. Is not that guarantee enough for the correctness of the facts alleged and the sincerity of those who advance them?