It is surely a damning coincidence that when the Kaiser and von Moltke were telling King Albert that war was inevitable, was the very time chosen by the National Liberal Federation to demand the reduction of our Navy Estimates, and to threaten the Government with a dangerous division in the party unless the demand were complied with! Reduction in armaments, forsooth! The Government knew the facts, and did indeed resist the demand; but for weeks there was a crisis in the Cabinet, and even in January, 1914, as the _Globe_ pointed out, a Minister took the occasion to declare that a unique opportunity had arrived for revising the scale of our expenditure on Armaments! While Mr. McKenna was, as late as last November, endeavouring in an outrageous manner to gag the _Globe_, and to prevent that newspaper from telling the public the truth of the spy-peril, Lord Haldane--the scales from whose eyes regarding his friend the Kaiser appear now to have fallen--made a speech on November 25th, 1914, in the House of Lords in which he, at last, admitted the existence of spies. The following are extracts from this speech:-- "With the extraordinary intelligence system which Germany organised in this country _long before the war_, no doubt they had certain advantages which they ought not to have even of this kind.... If he were to harbour a suspicion it would be that the most formidable people were not aliens, but probably people of British nationality who had been suborned.... He wishes he were sure that when really valuable and dangerous pieces of information were given they were not given by people of our own nationality, but some of the information which had been given, could only have been given by people who had access to it because they were British. His belief was that we had had very little of this kind of thing, but that we had some, and that it was formidable he could not doubt. In seeking these sources of communication with the enemy it was desirable to go about the search in a scientific way, and to cast suspicion where it was most likely to be founded." Such a contribution to the spy question was really very characteristic. It, however, came ill from one whose legal _confrère_ was, at that moment, being referred to in the House of Commons as having a German chauffeur who had been naturalised after the war broke out, and _had gone for a holiday_ into Switzerland! Switzerland is a country not in the Antarctic Ocean, but right on the border of the land of the Huns in Europe, and the Lord Chief Justice, according to Mr. Asquith at the Guildhall, is in close association with Cabinet Ministers in these days of crises.