From the spirited account given by Sir Edward Goschen in his dispatch to Sir Edward Grey, we can readily picture to ourselves the historic scene that took place in the Chancellor’s room at the German Foreign Office on the 4th of August 1914, after England had declared war. We can call up the attitude of the two actors: the Chancellor, his gray-bearded face purple with rage, his tall form leaning towards the British Ambassador, while the latter’s pale features maintain the habitual coolness of his race. In voicing his indignation, the German hit upon phrases more vivid and picturesque than would have been expected from him. “Belgian neutrality, a scrap of paper!” These unlucky words will stick for ever to the memory of Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg. This man of wide culture, with a more exalted sense of justice than many of his countrymen, has shown us that respect for treaties no longer existed for him, so long as strategic considerations demanded that they should be broken. The inviolability of small States, their independence and their right to live, had no more value in his eyes than the international agreements that sanction these principles. On the same day, in the Reichstag, the Chancellor admitted, without any subterfuges—a frankness which he regrets to-day—that the Imperial Government, by the invasion of Belgium, had transgressed the law of nations. But, he pointed out, necessity knows no law, and he tried to excuse himself by attributing, without any probability or material proof, a similar design to the French. Belgium should quietly have let herself be invaded; she would have been indemnified later on! It was a sad disillusion for those who, thinking that they knew Bethmann-Hollweg, would never have regarded him as an unscrupulous politician. If he could not be a great minister, he might at least have endorsed Prussia’s signature and guarded the honour of the young German Empire. A mere nod from the Emperor was enough to make him the zealous vindicator of a crime. His language in this tragic crisis was that of a court sycophant without courage or conscience, not that of a statesman. In spite of his philosophy, he resigned himself to an act that disgraced Germany, and thus played the part, not of a patriotic and independent thinker, but of a courtier-philosopher. VII.