Russia’s spirited determination, coupled with her dignified conciliatory disposition, caused painful heartburnings in Vienna. It constituted the first hitch in the official programme. What was the good of having agents in St. Petersburg, who supplied exact copies of State papers and faithful narratives of private conversations, if the legitimate deductions from these data were upset at the very outset? To me, who witnessed the gradual breaking in of this painful light on the systematic mind of Teutonic diplomacy, there was something intensely ludicrous in the tragic spirit in which it was received. Could nothing, it was asked, be done to keep Russia in bounds? Was France fully alive to the issues which Russia’s intervention would raise? Where was the love of peace so lately and so loudly professed by the Tsar and M. Poincaré? I had not the faintest doubt as to how Russia would behave under the provocation to which she was being subjected by the Teutonic States. There are some considerations of an altruistic nature which nations, like individuals, set above their own vital interests--considerations that engage all that is deepest and noblest in their feelings, that fire their imagination and call forth all the energies of their will. And the fate of the little Servian nation was one of these causes. To the Russian the Slav cause is much more than a political interest: it is a religious cult. But for such altruistic heroisms the Prussianized German has no sense. To him it is the fourth emotional dimension. On July 30th I despatched the following telegram to the _Daily Telegraph_, which I afterwards discovered was not transmitted: It would be a delusion to suppose that Russia will keep the peace while Servia is undergoing punishment that would reduce her to the rank of a semi-vassal State, and it would be a piece of still greater self-deception to imagine that Germany will not raise her army to its war-footing once the mobilization order has been issued in St. Petersburg, or will not use that army to the full when it is in the field. And as Austria-Hungary is resolved to have her way with Servia, and to refuse to render account of her action to any other Power, one is forced to the conclusion that the only possible solution to the present crisis is the much-dreaded European war. It is for that tremendous struggle that the Great Powers, and possibly one or other of the smaller ones, must now make ready.