In principle, Russia did not want to go to war, but she was ready to sacrifice her wish for peace if only England would join in with her and cry “Hands off!” to Prussia and Austria. England did not want war in July, 1914, but on the 4th of August war was declared. The cases are exactly similar. In both cases a “scrap of paper” was torn up by Prussia, who only a few months earlier had guaranteed the integrity of King Christian’s dominions. In 1914 mercifully Lord Russell had been long “resting and being thanked” over the mischief he had wrought. Sterner and more chivalrous doctrines prevailed, and this time England was ready to draw the sword for a principle of honour. It is, I know, an absolute mistake to suppose that if we had carried out the policy indicated by Lord Palmerston in Parliament at the end of the Session of 1863 we should have stood alone. Russia would have been with us. Our position, supposing we had gone to war, would have been all to our advantage—as Lord John Manners pointed out, it would have been “the most popular, the easiest and the cheapest war (for it can be managed by our navy alone) of the century.”[24] Lord John Manners was quite right. We should have sent our navy to Danish waters, and we need not have sent out a single soldier. To march upon Berlin would have been a mere holiday task for the Russian army, a sort of picnic, like our march upon Magdala. But I can assert that it was the firm conviction of the best informed diplomatists of Europe that the mere knowledge that England and Russia were determined to uphold the rights of Denmark would of itself have sufficed to avert war. I have written elsewhere how, when Lord Napier had to tell Prince Gortchakoff that England would not join with him, the Prince answered: “Alors, milord, je mets de côté la supposition que l’Angleterre fasse jamais la guerre pour une question d’honneur.” That was the conviction which guided him in all his subsequent dealings with England, the advances in Central Asia, in defiance of all treaties, until the gates of Afghanistan were reached, and in 1870, when France was crippled, the tearing up of the Black Sea Treaty obligations of 1856. Mr. Buckle is so clear-minded a critic of foreign politics that I should hesitate to differ from him were I not possessed of absolute knowledge not from hearsay. A study of the “Origines diplomatiques de la guerre de 1870” can only confirm what I have said; and that exhaustive publication proves up to the hilt my contention that since the origin of the war of 1870 was due to the betrayal of Denmark in 1863-64, it is to the grave political blunders then made that we must ascribe the outrage of 1914. Free of England and Russia, Bismarck was able to carry out his full programme: (1) Kiel and a navy. (2) The crippling of Austria. (3) The humiliation of France. (4) Who can doubt what that was? The destruction of England’s sea power, and the world under the heel of Prussia.