There stood the German Empire, intensively trained in the arts of war for forty years, pleading cowardice in extenuation of her broken word. "France could wait, we could not!" A brave man, Bethmann-Hollweg, unless he knew before he spoke that the whole nation had sunk to the immoral level of the cowards who invaded Belgium because they feared that on a fair field France would have beaten them! It is curious that in the whole record of German state-craft in the war, the Chancellor's confession of his empire's degradations stands out almost like a clean thing. The Chancellor did not deceive the people except in his implication that France would have struck through Belgium if Germany had not. He did not deceive himself, either. He knew the cowardice of Germany. It is probable that he believed, as the Junkers believed, that England, too, was a coward. Prince Lichnowsky had told them the truth about England, but they had not believed. In the years of Kultur, they had forgotten what honor was like. They chose to credit the stories that England was torn with dissensions, threatened with rebellion in Ireland and India, nervous from labor troubles, and not only physically unprepared for war but mentally and morally unfit for war. Even the telegram of Sir Edward Grey, communicated on the day of Belgium's invasion, to the German Government by the British Ambassador at Berlin, did not dispel the illusion about Great Britain: In view of the fact that Germany declined to give the same assurance respecting Belgium as France gave last week in reply to our request made simultaneously at Berlin and Paris, we must repeat that request and ask that a satisfactory reply to it and to my telegram of this morning be received here by 12 o'clock to-night. If not, you are instructed to ask for your passports and to say that His Majesty's Government feels bound to take all steps in their power to uphold the neutrality of Belgium and the observance of a treaty to which Germany is as much a party as ourselves. Even that memorable document, we say, did not convince Germany that common honor still lived across the Channel. The Foreign Secretary, Von Jagow, a mere tool of the Kaiser, took it mechanically; but Von Bethmann-Hollweg added to the sum of German cowardice. Brave as he had been in the Reichstag, he whimpered to Sir Edward Goschen when he saw that "12 o'clock to-night" on paper. This account of the conversation is Goschen's, but the German Chancellor later confirmed the Englishman's version: